Experimental Study Of Carbon Nanotube Synthesis Via Pyrolysis Of Ferrocene In Microwave Oven

Carbon nanotube is a nano-carbon material, which has many outstanding mechanical, electronic and optical properties. Carbon nanotube can be treated as the graphite layers roll up along a certain direction, and the configuration of carbon atoms in carbon nanotubes are sp2, which are the same as the atoms in graphite. Ferrocene is a component which can provide not only the catalyst(the iron atom) for the growth of carbon nanotube but also the carbon source(the cyclopentadienyl rings). Microwave heating is a rapid heating method which is different from the traditional heating method and has been widely used in the field of material synthesis.In this dissertation, the properties of the ferrocene and the microwace heating were combined, and the synthesis of carbon nanotube was carried out in a homemade microwace oven. As the ferrocene cannot be heated by microwave directly, the graphite, Degussa carbon black, Mitsubishi carbon black and coal-char were used as microwace absorbent and the substrates for catalyst deposition and carbon nanotube growth.First, the characteristic of temperature rise of the carbon substracts under repeatedly microwace heating was summarized. As the temperature rise charateristic has great relationship with the micro-structure of the material, the X-Ray Diffraction and Raman Spectroscopy technologies was used to study the micro-structure of the carbon substrates before and after microwace heating, and the result showed that the degree of graphitization was imporved.Then the experiment of the ferrocene deposited on different carbon subsrtates was carried out in a homemade microwave oven. The production on different substrates were analyzed and found that the carbon nanotube were only synthetized on the graphite substrate in a large scale. And the growth mechanisms for carbon nanotube consist of the tip-growth model and the base-growth model.The X-ray diffaction analysis of the carbon nanotube growth on graphite substrate showed that the average spacing between the graphene layers was 0.34 nm and the average wall thickness was 11 nm. The Raman spectroscopy of carbon nanotube showed that the curl direction had some obvious characteristics.