Carbon Nanotechnology from Carbon Black

22 March 2007

The discovery of carbon nanotechnology begins with discoveries of fullerenes in 1985 and then carbon nanotube in the year 1991. Actually it was the production cost of fullerens that halted the growth of carbon nanotechnology for a few years. With the advancement in the combustion methods for producing fullerenes, the production cost is expected to come down by at least one tenth. The current production cost of single wall carbon nanotubes is too high and therefore these are rarely being considered for industrial applications, however multi wall carbon nanotubes produced by chemical vapor deposition methods are well in demand.

Many researchers are trying to look for other alternates for producing carbon nanoparticles from other sources and carbon black is one of the cheapest available sources for this technology. Carbon black is being produced all over the world in large quantities. The main drawback of carbon black is its very low crystalline nature. The major transformation required is crystallization of carbon black.

In large heating or graphitization has been used to increase the crystallization of amorphous carbon. It has been observed that heating alone do not provide encouraging result for converting carbon black to carbon nano-onions, most stable isomer analogue to fullerene. Researchers were able to produce carbon nano-onions from carbon black by irradiating electron beam focused at high current density in high resolution transmission electron micrographs (HRTEM). What is more important to get the right quality of nano-onions is a good crystallinity carbon black as starting material and voltage high enough to displace carbon atom from lattice.

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