AIST, Zeon Develop Way to Mass Produce Carbon Nanotubes Much Cheaper

Tokyo, Feb. 7 (Jiji Press)–Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, known as AIST, said Wednesday it has improved a method for mass producing carbon nanotubes, achieving higher output efficiency and lower production costs.

With the improved method, developed jointly with Japanese synthetic rubber and chemical maker Zeon Corp. , researchers were able to produce more than one gram of single-walled carbon nanotubes, or SWNTs, in ten minutes, 100 times more efficiently than by using conventional methods.

This production efficiency is the highest in the world, said the researchers, led by Kenji Hata, head of the nanocarbon team of AIST’s Research Center for Advanced Carbon Materials.

The team also succeeded in lowering production costs by using a substrate, on which carbon nanotubes are grown, made of a nickel alloy, which is cheaper than conventionally used silicon.

AIST and Zeon plan by 2010 to make a prototype of a machine that can continuously produce carbon nanotubes, aiming to lower production costs to 500 yen per gram, one-hundredth of the current level.

The improved method is based on the “super growth” technology for SWNT synthesis which AIST developed in 2004.

SWNTs are nanomaterials one to several micrometers in length, with diameters ranging from 0.4 to 50 nanometers. One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.

Carbon nanotubes, first reported to a science journal by Sumio Ijima, head of AIST’s Research Center for Advanced Carbon Materials, in 1991, can be used for a wide range of products, from high- strength textiles for aviation materials to electrodes for capacitors. But their commercialization has been held up by the lack of technologies for efficient mass production.END

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