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Unifying the templating effects of porous anodic alumina on metallic nanoparticles for carbon nanotube synthesis

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Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are a promising material for many applications, due to their extraordinary properties. Some of these properties vary in relation to the diameter of the nanotubes; thus, precise control of CNT diameter can be critical. Porous anodic alumina (PAA) membranes have been successfully used to template electrodeposited catalyst. However, the catalysts used in CNT synthesis are frequently deposited with more precise techniques, such as electron beam deposition. We test the efficacy of PAA as a template for electron beam-deposited catalyst by studying the diameter distribution of CNTs grown catalyst of various thicknesses supported by PAA. These are then compared by ANOVA to the diameter distributions of CNTs grown on metal catalyst supported by a conventional alumina film. These results also allow a unified description of two templating effects, the more common particles-in-pores model, and the recently described particles-between-pores.

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Notes

  1. Here, the term porous anodic alumina is used, and abbreviated PAA, as this seems the most common convention in the literature. Other terminology has been used, including porous aluminum oxide (PAOX) (Schneider et al. 2008), anodic alumina nanoholes (AAN) (Iwasaki et al. 1999), anodic alumina template (AAT) (Sui et al. 2001b), anodic aluminum oxide (Hu et al. 2001), or simply nanoporous alumina (PA) (Lan et al. 2001).

  2. The ET3000 furnace is a thermal CVD system with horizontal flow through a quartz tube. The quartz tube has an inner diameter of approximately 7.5 cm, and a length of approximately 61 cm. The heated length is marginally shorter, due to the tube insulation.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), through the following Grants: Engineering Research Center (ERC), number 0812348; Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI), number 1120382. Additional support was provided by the Office of Naval Research, through Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP). Melodie Fickenscher and the Cincinnati branch of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) provided assistance in collecting the Hi-resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy images central to this work. Svitlana Fialkova, of the Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures (CAMMS) lab at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCAT), provided assistance in collecting and measuring the Hi-resolution Scanning Electron Microscopy images of PAA and CNTs on PAA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical, Chemical and Environmental Engineering, 580 Engineering Research Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Mark R. Haase, Noe T. Alvarez, Rachit Malik, Mark Schulz & Vesselin Shanov

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  1. Mark R. Haase
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  2. Noe T. Alvarez
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  3. Rachit Malik
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  4. Mark Schulz
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  5. Vesselin Shanov
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Correspondence to Mark R. Haase.

Electronic supplementary material

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11051_2015_3159_MOESM1_ESM.docx

Electronic Supplementary Information (ESI) available: Supplementary information includescomplete histograms of the diameter, examples of the TEM images used to collect the diameterdata, and the recipe used to synthesize the carbon nanotubes. Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 12288 kb)

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Haase, M.R., Alvarez, N.T., Malik, R. et al. Unifying the templating effects of porous anodic alumina on metallic nanoparticles for carbon nanotube synthesis. J Nanopart Res 17, 359 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-015-3159-2

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