Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) Grown by CVD

Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) Grown by CVD

Klean Graphene produces single-walled carbon nanotubes using a Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) growth process, from carbon recovered out of waste tires and scrap rubber.

Carbon nanotubes sit at the point where materials science stops being incremental. A tube of rolled graphitic carbon carries current, conducts heat and resists tensile load at levels bulk materials cannot approach, which is why nanotubes now appear in battery electrodes, structural composites, conductive coatings and electronic devices rather than only in papers.

How the tubes are grown

Klean uses a Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) growth process. CVD is the route that gives real control over the growth environment, and the Klean process yields both semiconducting and metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes. That distinction is the first question any serious CNT buyer asks: semiconducting populations matter to device and sensor developers, metallic populations matter where raw conductivity is the specification. A supplier that can speak to both is working at process level, not reselling drums.

Waste rubber as the carbon source

The carbon feeding this process comes from end-of-life tires and scrap rubber, carbonised and converted through the Klean Carbon arm of Klean Industries. The underlying carbonisation and purification know-how was developed with Mitsubishi Corporation, which collaborated with Klean on carbonisation and on fullerene synthesis and purification from the late 1980s through the 1990s.

Production volume

The joint pilot in Japan opened in 2000 at 0.4 tonnes per annum and was scaled to process roughly 2,500,000 used tires, around 20,000 tonnes of rubber per year. At full-scale output the plant produces approximately 700 tonnes per annum of carbon nanotubes alongside about 7,000 tonnes per annum of nano-recovered carbon black. Seven hundred tonnes a year of CNTs is a supply position, not an allocation queue.

Where CNTs are being specified

Current application areas include batteries and supercapacitors, conductive and protective coatings, aerospace and construction composites, electronics and medicine. Each imposes its own requirements on purity, residual catalyst, aspect ratio and dispersion behaviour — which is precisely why nanotube procurement is a technical conversation rather than a catalogue order.

Tube characterisation data, the semiconducting-to-metallic split, dispersion guidance and volume pricing are released against a stated application. Tell us what the tubes have to do.