Quantifying crystallinity in carbon nanotubes and its influence on mechanical behaviour

The different fabrication methods that have been developed for making carbon nanotubes will provide materials with different levels of crystallinity. As crystallinity is qualitatively known to have a profound influence on material properties, this raises the need for standardised quantitative analysis. Here we show how transmission electron microscopy can be used to provide quantitative information about effective crystallite sizes in individual nanotubes which we link to the mechanical behaviour of the tubes. The method relies on a thorough analysis of diffraction patterns and a careful extraction of instrumental and sample contributions to the peak shapes. We find that arc-discharge grown tubes have crystallite sizes that are comparable to the circumference of the outer tube walls, while commercial catalytically grown tubes have much smaller crystallites implying that each cylindrical nanotube wall can be thought of as a patchwork of small graphene-like grains. The clear differences in crystallite sizes are then compared to known differences in mechanical behaviour, such as a substantial disparity in stiffness and significantly different behaviours under bending stress.