Growth of Tall Vertical Carbon Nanotube Forests using Al-Fe Catalysts and Transfer to Flexible Substrates

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple, rapid method for growing dense, tall, vertically aligned carbon nanotube forests using Al-Fe catalysts, which can be transferred onto flexible substrates for various applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, efficient growth process for high-quality CNT forests using Al-Fe catalysts, enabling easy transfer to flexible substrates.

Findings

High-density CNT forests achieved with Al-Fe catalysts

Uniform growth over large areas

Successful transfer to flexible substrates

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have found plenty of applications in electronics, sensing, actuation, mechanical structures, etc. There is a growing demand to produce large scale arrays of CNTs that can satisfy the requirements of cost effective, quick and relatively simpler methods of growth. The other conflicting requirement is to produce very high quality of CNTs in very high densities and volumes. There has been considerable research that has gone into resolving the above mentioned issues. Here we show that a significantly simple and quick method of growing CNTs using Al-Fe thin film catalysts can also produce very dense and tall forests of vertically aligned CNTs that can be grown very uniformly over a substrate. We further show that this can be easily transferred onto a flexible substrate like an adhesive tape.