Preloading catalysts in the reactor for repeated growth of horizontally aligned carbon nanotube arrays

This work presents a highly efficient and reliable strategy to grow horizontally aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays on surfaces via preliminarily loading catalysts into the reactor. With the heat treatment before the growth of CNTs, the catalysts would migrate from the inner surface of the reactor to the surface of the targeted substrate to induce the growth of aligned CNTs. With this “in-situ catalyst loading” approach, aligned CNTs could be grown on different bare substrates, such as silicon, quartz and sapphire. The growth of CNTs could be repeated up to 50 times with reliable results via only one-time catalyst preloading process, avoiding the deposition of catalysts before each round of growth and the related randomicity, and thus benefiting the mass production of aligned CNT arrays on surfaces.