Structural Design and Fabrication of Multifunctional Nanocarbon Materials for Extreme Environmental Applications

Abstract

Extreme environments represent numerous harsh environmental conditions, such as temperature, pressure, corrosion, and radiation. The tolerance of applications in extreme environments exemplifies significant challenges to both materials and their structures. Given the superior mechanical strength, electrical conductivity, thermal stability, and chemical stability of nanocarbon materials, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene, they are widely investigated as base materials for extreme environmental applications and have shown numerous breakthroughs in the fields of wide‐temperature structural‐material construction, low‐temperature energy storage, underwater sensing, and electronics operated at high temperatures. Here, the critical aspects of structural design and fabrication of nanocarbon materials for extreme environments are reviewed, including a description of the underlying mechanism supporting the performance of nanocarbon materials against extreme environments, the principles of structural design of nanocarbon materials for the optimization of extreme environmental performances, and the fabrication processes developed for the realization of specific extreme environmental applications. Finally, perspectives on how CNTs and graphene can further contribute to the development of extreme environmental applications are presented.

Pure and Metal‐confining Carbon Nanotubes through Electrochemical Reduction of Carbon Dioxide in Ca‐based Molten Salts

“…[32,33] Both Sn and CNT show excellent thermal conductivity (66.6 W m À 1 K À 1 for Sn and 3000 W m À 1 K À 1 for CNT). [33,34] The thermal expansion coefficient of Sn (2.35 × 10 À 5 K À 1 ) is much larger than CNT (À 1.3 × 10 À 6 K À 1 ), which enables Sn column stretching while CNT retaining during temperature variation. [35,36] In situ high-temperature TEM (Figure 6a) shows that the morphol-ogy of CNT is barely changed upon temperature variation, while the encapsulated Sn column obviously stretches during heating and shrinks during cooling.…”

Eu2+ and Mn2+ co-doped Lu2Mg2Al2Si2O12 phosphors for high sensitivity and multi-mode optical pressure sensing

“…An extreme environment can affect the internal structure of materials, including inter-atomic bonding, microstructure arrangement, electronic structure and electron/phonon motion in atoms, resulting in property changes in the function of materials. 1 High pressure is one such common extreme environment, which is extensively used in various fields, such as new material synthesis, 2 superconductivity, 3,4 induced luminescence 5 and so on. At present, what is frequently used to provide high pressure is the symmetric diamond anvil chamber (DAC) device designed by Piermarini et al , 6 which can fulfill spectral and structural characterization under in situ high-pressure conditions.…”

Graphene Interlocking Carbon Nanotubes for High-Strength and High-Conductivity Fibers

“…Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), featuring an excellent combination of low density, superior flexibility, ultrahigh strength and modulus, and good thermal and electrical conductivities, have been well known as the ideal building block for the next-generation high-performance fibers. − Owing to these outstanding features, carbon nanotube fibers (CNTFs) could achieve plenty of engineering applications in bulletproof vests, lightweight wires, artificial muscles, energy systems, flexible electronics, etc. − Various techniques have been developed to produce CNTFs, such as spinning from the CNT liquid crystal dope, , spinning from the vertically aligned CNT arrays, and direct spinning from the CNT aerogels. − Generally, the direct spinning process offers a feasible way to realize the continuous and scalable production of CNTFs. However, so far, the properties of CNTFs, particularly their strength and electrical conductivity, are still not a circumstance to individual CNTs, ,, strongly hindering their niche applications.…”