Controlled Manufacturing of Lightweight, All-Carbon High Performance Materials Using Low-Cost Solvent Assembly

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Materials composed of carbon nanostructures have extraordinary promise for lightweighting, ultra-strength, and high conductivity with diverse applications ranging from active components in rechargeable batteries to reinforced structural composites. However, macroscopic materials that retain the inherent properties of carbon nanostructures, such as mechanical strength one hundred times greater than steel, thermal properties of diamond, and electrical conduction better than metals, have remained elusive due to required manufacturing precision at the scale of individual carbon nanostructures or molecules to achieve such properties, a scale not achievable with conventional manufacturing. This award supports fundamental multi-disciplinary research to understand and control the mechanisms behind forming three-dimensional structures of carbon-based materials designed at the molecular level to exhibit tailored mechanical, electrical, thermal, and chemical properties. The outcome of this effort will be a new large-scale manufacturing approach to enable high throughput, low-cost three-dimensional manufacturing of lightweight next-generation carbon-based materials. These materials are broadly applicable to diverse areas of structural and energy storage materials, and will specifically be assessed for their performance in batteries capable of replacing gasoline in transportation systems. This award will support research that directly benefits the US economy and society, while also integrating an educational and outreach component aimed to open a window between the research laboratory and the classroom, stimulate interest in high school students through local outreach programs, and aggressively drive participation from underrepresented and minority students. This approach utilizes electrophoretic deposition, a technique using electric fields generated between two conductive electrodes to drive the motion and deposition of carbon nanoparticles dispersed in stable solvents. This effort is focused on understanding and exploiting the control achievable in this technique to fabricate hybrid assemblies of diverse carbon nanostructures, including graphene, carbon nanotubes, and carbon nanohorns, to enable nanostructure-controlled tunable physical properties. This focuses on the science behind (i) the development of surfactant free, pristine hybrid carbon nanomaterials from low-cost solvents that have potential for reusability in continuous manufacturing and (ii) the mechanisms governing deposition into three-dimensional structures and on low-cost plastic or insulating materials. This effort ultimately leads to the development of a roll-to-roll electrophoretic deposition system that can both improve the precision of electrophoretic nanomanufacturing and also seed low-cost, large-scale fabrication processes for functional carbon materials relevant to diverse applications, and specifically next-generation batteries and supercapacitors.