Invited Paper MS+PS+TF-ThM3
Manufacturing and Applications of Carbon Nanotube Textiles

Thursday, November 13, 2014, 8:40 am, Room 302

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are short nanofibers that are usually produced in the form of a black powder. This powder is then incorporated into other materials to produce a wide array of multifunctional products. Processing raw CNTs into materials that look and behave like traditional textiles is a growing area of interest, however the CNTs are often processed in solution and the end products look more like papers than textiles. There are currently only a couple of options for creating fabrics out of CNTs which preserve the high surface area of the individual tubes and retain high porosity. This presentation covers the work of my research group to make this type of fabric from a special type of CNT structure called drawable CNT arrays. These arrays are synthesized in a low pressure chemical vapor deposition process and then utilized for CNT nonwoven fabric formation. My group is also exploring many novel applications for the use of these unique fabrics.

The nonwoven CNT fabrics produced in our lab contain millimeter long CNTs, have a preferential CNT alignment, low CNT bundling and high porosity. These features make them attractive for use in: composites reinforcement, battery electrodes, sensing, filtration and barrier fabrics. Of particular interest to the AVS community may be our recent work with collaborator Dr. Jesse Jur at NC State, to study the atomic layer deposition (ALD) of thin inorganic layers into CNT arrays and fabrics. Through optimization of CNT pretreatment, ALD parameters and sample orientation, we have been able, for the first time, to uniformly coat CNT structures whose characteristic aspect ratios are extremely large. Due to the un-bundled nature of the CNT fabrics we have the ability to uniformly coat CNTs along their entire millimeter length, making for some very unique hybrid CNT structures.