Carbon as Conductor: A Pragmatic View

摘要

Carbon nanotubes (CNT) have been touted as a game-changing material for medicine, microelectronics, and renewable energy. Moving beyond hype to product development, efforts at TE Connectivity (TEC) have focused on electromagnetic interference shielding and data transmission cables using commercially available CNT materials. With a tape format we have achieved greater than 50dB shielding effectiveness in GHz range; current CNT materials do not provide adequate shielding below 100 MHz. Data transmission cables made using a yarn format perform comparably to MIL-STD 1553. Termination is possible using standard techniques (e.g. crimping, soldering) without contact resistance issues due to the relatively high resistivity of the CNT formats. A key area of improvement is enhanced conductivity of the CNT macroscopic formats to enable both high speed and power applications, not currently possible with commercially available CNTs. Environmental, safety, and health concerns are non-trivial and we share our approach in this paper.