Large quantity production of Carbon Nanotubes

"Carbon nanotubes have enormous potential for applications in composites, batteries, and nanostructured devices. However, these applications will not become feasible until the material is produced in kilogram per day quantities. Compounding the problem isthe material's high cost, presently $500/g. Apart from the simple supply and demand economics, the cost is driven by three factors: expensive capital equipment, low process yields and laborious purification procedures.In the Phase I effort, NanoLab developed and demonstrated a semi-continuous process that results in multi gram per hour yields of high quality multiwall carbon nanotubes, overcoming the two major hurdles to large scale commercialization of carbonnanotubes: yield and purity.The main Phase II goal will be to develop a fully continuous process, that will produce large quantities of high quality carbon nanotubes: multiwall, single-wall, powders, and arrays. Based on our effort thus far, we expect to achieve yield of more than 5kilogram per day, at less than $2 per gram pricing by 2004, for multiwall nanotubes. In addition, we will improve the control over the application driven variants of nanotube morphologies, through experimenting and theoretical and numerical processmodeling. We will develop the market for nanotubes and their applications."