Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Carbon Nanotubes Synthesis by Chemical Vapor Deposition

In this paper, an experimental study aimed at achieving better control of the deposition patterns of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is presented. CNTs were grown on a long of reactor by the catalytic chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of a benzene/ferrocene solution at 1073 K. The deposition patterns on the substrate were controlled for process times and carrier gas flow rates. In order to investigate the reaction mechanism and production rate for the growth of CNTs in catalyst CVD, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was developed in this study. Then the computational model was integrated with the dynamic model to optimize the process parameters formulating a correlation between turbulence, deposition rate for the growth of carbon nanotubes and parameters as process time and carrier gas flow rate. Scanning electron microscopes (SEM) are used to characterize carbon nanotubes products.