Growth mechanism and wave-absorption properties of multiwalled carbon nanotubes fabricated using a gaseous detonation method

Abstract Multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were fabricated via the detonation of a mixed gas consisting of ferrocene vapor, methane, and oxygen. The samples were characterized using transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, vibrating sample magnetometry, and a vector network analyzer. The results indicate that the samples were MWCNTs that were about 30 nm in external diameter, about 15 nm in inner diameter. The ferrocene dosage had an obvious effect on the morphology, degree of graphitization, and magnetic property of the MWCNTs. The growth mechanism of the MWCNTs in the gaseous detonation process was discussed using the detonation Zeldovich-von Neumann-Doring model and a vapor-liquid-solid growth model. The minimum reflection loss of the MWCNTs was −6.1 dB at 11.2 GHz with a thickness of 2 mm, which is lower than that of the MWCNTs prepared via other methods, and the reasons for this result are analyzed in the paper.