Mechanically strong and highly conductive graphitized carbon nanowire arrays for nano-fabrication of carbon-based...

Current carbonaceous fibers with 0.3-7 GPa tensile strength are ideally crystallized towards graphitized carbon nanowires for highly mechanical and conductive properties. An essential approach for this case is being challenged by the formation of graphitized carbon microstructures and the reduction of size to the nanoscale in the fabrication of carbonaceous fibers at a low temperature (1000 °C) that the chip can withstand without melting. Here the method for orienting carbon molecular chains in carbon microstructures is developed by chemical modification of polymer structure, conformational structuration of polymer molecular chains and axial orientation of carbon molecular chains. Using this method, carbon molecular chains are nearly all oriented along the axial directions, but are entangle in very small amounts. Our results demonstrate the presence of graphitized carbon microstructure in the carbon nanowires integrated with microstructure-based chips. We find that the graphitized nanowires exhibit unexpected tensile strength up to 24.74 GPa while having superior modulus and highly electrical conductivity up to 501.06 GPa and 1.16 × 10⁵S/m, respectively. The ability to synthesize patternable graphitized carbon nanowires on micro-pillars and micro-scaffolds of chips creates opportunities for research into correlated carbon microstructure and chip-based superior performances that are dependent on the nano-scaling and graphitizing of carbonaceous fibers.