SBIR Phase I: Scalable Electrochemical Production Of Carbon Nanotubes From Carbon Dioxide

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address a critical bottleneck to widespread advanced material use in commercial markets. Carbon nanotubes are advanced supermaterials that have been at the forefront of technological innovation since their discovery in the early 1990s, but limited commercial success has ensued due to their high cost of production. Current use of carbon nanotube materials is limited to a few industries capable of absorbing the high cost of research-scale quantities of carbon nanotubes (defense applications, aerospace manufacturers, and research institutions). Achieving scalable, lower-cost carbon nanotube manufacturing processes will enable widespread applications such as: advanced batteries with lower cost, weight, and improved longevity, tires with longer lifetimes and increased fuel efficiency, and coatings enabling enhanced functionality such as in the case of de-icing for aircrafts, spacecraft vehicles, and drones. The societal impact of this advancement includes better performing and more energy efficient devices for consumers without added cost. The commercial impact of this technology will enable the significant effort carried out in many market sectors to evaluate and understand the benefit of carbon nanotubes to products, to be economically realized. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a novel electrochemical liquid-phase growth method for carbon nanotube production, which significantly lowers the cost of production for carbon nanotubes and enables widespread commercial use of the materials. The largest bottleneck to carbon nanotube utilization today is the high production cost that arises due to numerous factors including low efficiency of chemical processes, high overhead cost for scaling, and formation of toxic by-products that require additional costs. These limitations have led to high prices for the materials that prohibit their use in cost-sensitive markets, which rely on low-cost additives such as carbon black. The research objectives of this SBIR project will demonstrate feasibility of using a scalable catalyst preparation and deposition technique for the production of carbon nanotubes through low-cost, environmentally-beneficial electrochemical routes. To achieve this, we will utilize ambient processing for catalyst preparation and a scalable electrochemical reaction chamber that harnesses the precision of electrochemistry, sources the carbon feedstock directly from air, and operates at extremely high energy efficiencies (>90%). The anticipated technical results include a rapid and scalable growth technique with minimized added cost from catalyst deposition without compromising carbon nanotube quality. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.