Desktop systems for manufacturing carbon nanotube films by chemical vapor deposition

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) exhibit exceptional electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties that could potentially transform such diverse fields as composites, electronics, cooling, energy storage, and biological sensing. For the United States Navy, composites potentially provide a significant decrease in lifetime maintenance costs of ships by eliminating hull corrosion. A stronger composite could also improve naval ship survivability or increase combat payloads by reducing the hull weight of ships and submarines. Further, cooling requirements of ship borne electronics have grown exponentially and represent a significant weight penalty for advanced ship designs. Any improvement in thermal transport could significantly improve future naval ship designs. In order to realize these benefits, methods must be discovered to fully characterize CNT growth mechanisms, consistently produce CNTs in manufacturable quantities, and to integrate CNTs into macroscale structures which reflect the properties of individual CNTs. While growth of CNTs in laboratory scale chemical vapor deposition (CVD) tube furnaces has shown great promise, existing low cost tube furnace designs limit the researcher's ability to fully separate critical reaction parameters such as temperature and flow profiles and limit the rate of temperature change during the growth process.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Kuhn, David S. (David Scott)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alexander H. Slocum and David V. Burke.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40872

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40872