Plasma production of carbon nanotubes

The principle objective of the project is to provide a new process for continuous or semi-continuous production of high value carbon nanotubes based on high temperature thermal plasma technology, and establish a business alliance with the aim of up-scalin g the process to industrial scale. It is very important to demonstrate that the PPM technology can give a continuous production of carbon nanotubes (CNT). The advantages of the PPM technology are the possibility of achieving continuous bulk production, s traight nanotubes and thereby high strength, together with possibility of producing a clean product without remnants of catalyst. An important milestone for the project is to decide whether future focus on the continuous process will be with or without a catalyst. This decision will be taken already in June 2006. An idea-sketch for improvement of today?s reactor design for continuous production will be ready in February 2007. This idea-sketch will be the basis for developing and demonstrating continuous CNT production. A feasibility study (March 2008) will evaluate the continuous process regarding CNT production rate and purity compared to our competitors and the marked in other respects. Possible business partners will be identified. Based on this, our goal is to establish a business alliance within December 2008 that will finance future development from 2009. The global production rate can be summarized to 244 tons/year (S. Katagiri), reasonably well in accordance to the production capacity given by Cientifica, 294 tons/year, but only with 10 % utilization. Yearly global production is 29 tons/year of multi wall nanotubes (MWNT), and only 0.23 tons/year for single wall nantubes (SWNT). Most producers make use of Chemical vapour deposition (CVD), but s ome producers utilize the arc-method. There are countless examples of possible applications of carbon nanotubes, but very few examples of utilization of carbon nanotubes in commercial production.