Efficient Fabrication of High-Quality Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes and Their Macroscopic Conductive Fibers

High-purity and well-graphitized single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with excellent physiochemical properties are ideal building blocks for the assembly of various CNT macrostructures for a wide range of applications. We report the preparation of high-quality SWCNTs on a large scale using a floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition (FCCVD) method. Under the optimum conditions, the conversion rate of the carbon source to SWCNTs reached 28.8%, and 20.4% of the metal nanoparticles were active for SWCNT growth, which are 15% and ∼400 times higher than those previously reported for FCCVD synthesis, respectively. As a result, the prepared SWCNTs have a very low residual catalyst content of ∼1.9 wt % and a high rapid oxidation temperature of 717 °C. Using these high-quality SWCNTs, we spun macroscopic SWCNT fibers by a wet-spinning process. The resulting fibers had a high electrical conductivity of 6.67 MS/m, which is 32% higher than the best value previously reported for SWCNT fibers.