Characterization of Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanotube Forests Grown on Stainless Steel Surfaces.

Eleftheria Roumeli,Paul Johanns,Chiara Daraio,Giulio Parcianello,Marc Serra-Garcia,Marianna Diamantopoulou

doi:10.3390/nano9030444

Abstract

Vertically aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) forests are a particularly interesting class of nanomaterials, because they combine multifunctional properties, such as high energy absorption, compressive strength, recoverability, and super-hydrophobicity with light weight. These characteristics make them suitable for application as coating, protective layers, and antifouling substrates for metallic pipelines and blades. Direct growth of CNT forests on metals offers the possibility of transferring the tunable CNT functionalities directly onto the desired substrates. Here, we focus on characterizing the structure and mechanical properties, as well as wettability and adhesion, of CNT forests grown on different types of stainless steel. We investigate the correlations between composition and morphology of the steel substrates with the micro-structure of the CNTs and reveal how the latter ultimately controls the mechanical and wetting properties of the CNT forest. Additionally, we study the influence of substrate morphology on the adhesion of CNTs to their substrate. We highlight that the same structure-property relationships govern the mechanical performance of CNT forests grown on steels and on Si.

Highlights

The unique properties of carbon nanotube (CNT) forests have been documented extensively in the past decade [1,2,3,4]
Our results demonstrate the mechanical performance of CNT forests grown on steel is governed by the CNT micro-structure in the same way as it does on Si-grown CNTs
The average outer nanotube diameter, as calculated from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images, is 93 ± 20 nm for CNTs grown on S1–S2 and 65 ± 20 nm for CNTs grown on S3–S4

Summary

Introduction

The unique properties of carbon nanotube (CNT) forests have been documented extensively in the past decade [1,2,3,4]. CNT forests grown directly on metal substrates, and on steels, are interesting because they offer a conformal coating solution, which is independent from the substrate’s geometry [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36]. Floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition combines high CNT yield, vertical alignment, and conformal substrate coverage. This method is commonly used for CNT forest growth on metal substrates [12,15,25,34]. The mechanical response of CNT forests grown on metallic substrates, like their behavior under compression or impact, as well as their adhesion to the substrate, have not yet been thoroughly investigated

Methods

Results

Conclusion