Airbrush technique for vertically aligned carbon nanofibres

‘Because we’re using an airbrush, this technique could easily be incorporated into large-scale, high-throughput manufacturing processes,’ said Dr. Anatoli Melechko, an adjunct associate professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University and co-author of a paper describing the work. ‘In principle, you could cover an entire building with it.’

‘It’s common to use nickel nanoparticles as catalysts to grow carbon nanofibres, and we were able to coat metal substrates with nickel nanoparticles using an airbrush,’ said Dr. Joseph Tracy, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and senior author of the paper. ‘Airbrushing gives us a fairly uniform coating of the substrate and it can be applied to a large area at room temperature in a short period of time.’

According to NC State, after applying the nickel nanoparticles, the researchers airbrushed the substrate with a layer of silicon powder and heated the coated substrate to 600 degrees Celsius in a reactor filled with acetylene and ammonia gas.