Producing carbon nanotubes from graphite I am searching for the carbon nanotubes for very low cost. I have one idea, which is to use graphite (such as that found in pencils.) Can it be converted to carbon nanotubes? If so, what would be the procedure for this?
Graphite does not contain CNTs, a simple extraction therefore is not possible.
Graphite seemingly can be converted to CNTs by a "simple" oxidative method published by DW Lee and JW Seo on arxiv.org in 2010.
The authors claim to have used commercially available graphite powder (45 µm, Aldrich) of high purity (>99.995%), but did not provide any information on the yields.
Pencils typically contain a mixture of graphite powder and various amounts of clay as a binder.