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Correlating the fluctuated growth of carbon nanotubes with catalyst evolution by atmospheric-pressure environmental transmission electron microscopy

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Abstract

Rate-controlled growth of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and catalyst design are considered efficient ways for the preparation of CNTs with specific structures and properties. However, due to the difficulties in capturing the growth process of the CNTs with tiny size under a complex growth environment, the growth kinetics of CNTs and their correlation with the catalyst seed have been seldom revealed. Here, we investigated the growth process of CNTs from Ni nanoparticles (NPs) in real-time under atmospheric pressure using transmission electron microscopy equipped with a closed gas cell. It was found that the growth rates of CNTs fluctuated, and a phase transition from Ni3C to Ni, and a reshaping of the catalyst NPs occurred during the growth process. We demonstrated that CNTs dynamically interacted with the connected catalyst NPs and the fluctuated growth rates of CNTs were correlated with the structure change of catalyst NPs. The origin of the growth rate fluctuation is attributed to the change of carbon concentration gradient in catalyst NPs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51802316, 51927803, 52130209, 51972311, and 52188101), Basic Research Project of Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (No. ZR2019ZD49), the Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province, China (No. 2020-MS-009), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research (IMR), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Rui-Hong Xie, Lili Zhang, Ruixue Ma, Xin-Yu Jiao, Chang Liu & Hui-Ming Cheng

  2. School of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Rui-Hong Xie, Lili Zhang, Ruixue Ma, Xin-Yu Jiao & Chang Liu

  3. Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-0044, Japan

    Dai-Ming Tang

  4. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Institute of Technology for Carbon Neutrality, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Hui-Ming Cheng

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  1. Rui-Hong Xie
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  2. Lili Zhang
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Correlating the fluctuated growth of carbon nanotubes with catalyst evolution by atmospheric-pressure environmental transmission electron microscopy

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Xie, RH., Zhang, L., Ma, R. et al. Correlating the fluctuated growth of carbon nanotubes with catalyst evolution by atmospheric-pressure environmental transmission electron microscopy. Nano Res. 16, 12781–12787 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-6174-0

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