Aug 8, 2008

Carbon nanotubes, but without the 'nano'

There are carbon nanotubes, fullerenes and nano-foams, but now researchers have discovered yet
another new type of carbon material: colossal carbon tubes. Thousands of times bigger than their
nano counterparts, these tubes have exceptional mechanical and electrical properties and could
find applications from microelectric devices to bullet-proof body armour.

In the last 20 years, researchers have discovered several new forms of carbon in addition to
graphite (the type of carbon found in pencils) and diamond. The colossal carbon tubes, invented
by Huisheng Peng and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US and Fudan
University in China, are 40–100 µm in diameter and are centimetres long, which makes them —
unlike carbon nanotubes — visible to the naked eye. The researchers make them using a
chemical vapour deposition process that involves heating a mixture of ethylene and paraffin oil
at up to 850 °C in a quartz tube furnace (Physical Review Letters in press).

Scanning electron microscopy shows that the walls of the tubes, which are around a micron
thick, contain rectangular pores that range in size from hundreds of nanometres to microns.
High-resolution transmission electron microscopy further reveals that the walls have a layered
graphite crystal structure, and the inter-layer distance, determined by X-ray diffraction, is
0.34 nm — the same as graphite.
Light and strong

The tubes are very light and have densities similar to those of carbon nano-foams, or around
10 mg per cm3. Moreover, they are strong, with a maximum tensile stress of nearly 7 GPa, which
is higher than that of carbon nanotube fibres. Indeed, this makes them 30 times stronger than
Kevlar and 224 times stronger than cotton, says Peng.

And that’s not all: colossal carbon tubes are ductile and can be stretched, which makes them
attractive for applications requiring high toughness. They also have high electrical conductivities
of around 103 siemens per centimetre at room temperature, compared with 102 siemens per
centimetre for multi-walled carbon nanotube fibres. Conductivity also increases with
temperature, which implies that the tubes are semiconducting.

All these good properties mean that applications could be diverse, including lightweight body
armour, such as bullet-proof vests; high-strength composites that can be shaped into parts for
high-performance and lightweight vehicles; microelectronic systems and machines; and super
strong cloth.

The team now plans to understand how the colossal carbon tubes form and how to control their
structure better. “We also hope to improve their properties and investigate practical
applications,” says Peng.

About the author

Belle Dumé is contributing editor to nanotechweb.org