1 research outputs found
High Rate of Hydrogen Incorporation in Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanotubes during Initial Stages of Growth Quantified by Elastic Recoil Detection
We quantified the amount of hydrogen
in as-grown vertically aligned multiwall CNTs at different stages
of growth using elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA). We suggest
that hydrogen is associated with atomic defects and/or amorphous carbon
impurities formed at earlier deposition stages. We found that the
highest amount of hydrogen (2.3 wt %) was incorporated during the
initial growth stage (15–20 s). Our results show a decrease
of hydrogen content with increasing deposition time and/or with decreasing
growth rate, which points to dynamical self-annealing of hydrogen-saturated
defects. Consequently, the decrease of hydrogen-related defects leads
to a higher quality of MWCNTs, which can be easily detected by ERDA.
This research provides new insight into the nanotube growth mechanism
and provides a new characterization approach for quantifying hydrogen-saturated
atomic defects in MWCNTs