Preparation and Transport Performances of High-Density, Aligned Carbon Nanotube Membranes.

Lei Zhang,Junhe Yang,Bin Zhao,Guangping Zheng,Chuan Jiang

doi:10.1186/s11671-015-0970-8

Abstract

We report a simple and effective method for the preparation of high-density and aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes. The CNT arrays were prepared by water-assisted chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and were subsequently pushed over and stacked into dense membranes by mechanical rolling. It was demonstrated that various gases and liquids, including H2, He, N2, O2, Ar, water, ethanol, hexane, and kerosene, could effectively pass through the aligned carbon nanotube membranes. The membranes exhibited different selections on different gases, indicating that there was a separation potential for the gas mixtures. The selectivities (H2 relative to other gases) of H2/He, H2/N2, H2/O2, and H2/Ar were found to be lower than that of the ideal Knudsen model. For pure water, the permeability was measured to be 3.23 ± 0.05 ml·min−1·cm−2 at 1 atm, indicating that the CNT membranes were promising for applications in liquid filtration and separation.

Highlights

In the past decade, vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) membranes where carbon nanotubes are sealed in a polymer or inorganic matrix have been developed for gas and liquid transport applications [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
They demonstrated that liquid transporting through the composite membrane was several orders of magnitude faster than that predicted by the classical hydrodynamics theory owing to the smooth CNT walls
Holt et al [2] adopted a micro-fabrication method to produce membranes in which the double-walled CNTs were used as the only pores to span through a silicon nitride matrix deposited by chemical vapor deposition (CVD)

Summary

Introduction

Vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) membranes where carbon nanotubes are sealed in a polymer or inorganic matrix have been developed for gas and liquid transport applications [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Hinds et al [1] first fabricated multi-walled VACNT membranes with an inner diameter of 6–7 nm embedded in a rigid polystyrene matrix They demonstrated that liquid transporting through the composite membrane was several orders of magnitude faster than that predicted by the classical hydrodynamics theory owing to the smooth CNT walls. Holt et al [2] adopted a micro-fabrication method to produce membranes in which the double-walled CNTs were used as the only pores to span through a silicon nitride matrix deposited by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). They found that the measured gas flow was

Methods

Results

Conclusion