Statistical design of C10-Co-MCM-41 catalytic template for synthesizing smaller-diameter single-wall carbon nanotubes

As the SWNT diameter decreases, the diversity of possible chiral conformations decreases, therefore smaller-diameter SWNT with a narrow diameter distribution are highly desirable for applications such as electronic devices and chemical sensors. In this paper, Co-MCM-41 with 1.9 nm pore diameter was prepared as a catalytic template to produce SWNT with diameter as small as 0.77 nm. Both the statistical analysis of a design set of experiments and screening test experiments results based on a model from the design set show that the synthesis of Co-MCM-41 can be described by some significant predictors and their two-factor interaction terms. Raman spectroscopy results demonstrate the success of 0.77 nm diameter SWNT synthesis with 1.9 nm diameter Co-MCM-41 catalyst.