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Single walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) has been developed in the following order: Arc-discharge method, laser ablation method, HiPCO, eDIPS, and floating catalyst. Currently, only the floating catalyst method including eDIPS has been successfully commercialized, and small-scale mass production is being carried out only in Russia and China.
E-Cube Materials has been steadily developing SWCNT using the floating catalyst method. As a result of this achievement in 2025, the company developed its own horizontal FC-CVD equipment and introduced high-quality SWCNTs, and recently began supplying SWCNTs for dispersion.
While general CNT synthesis CVD attaches a catalyst to a powder or substrate and decomposes gas to synthesize CNTs from a fixed catalyst, FC-CVD is a continuous CNT synthesis device that vaporizes the catalyst into nano-clusters and allows the CNTs to grow in the suspended catalyst and exit the reactor. Although this method has a slow production speed, it has the great advantage of being able to synthesize SWCNTs with high quality.
Meanwhile, the SWCNT synthesis FC-CVD devices developed domestically were developed by research institutes and universities, and were equipment with low productivity. Accordingly, E-Cube Materials independently developed a horizontal FC-CVD with a special structure that can increase the productivity of SWCNT and ensure uniform quality. In particular, by jointly developing a new technology to increase the catalyst injection speed, the production speed per unit volume was improved 7 times compared to the previous one.
E-Cube Materials tested bottom-up vertical synthesis equipment and top-down vertical synthesis equipment in the development stage, but encountered problems such as heating and clogging of the nozzle due to the heat in the chamber rising upward, defects caused by upper rotating gasflow, and defects caused by differences in gas flow between the center and the outside. In particular, the long cooling time after one vertical test was the worst time during the experiment. Therefore, we developed and used a horizontal SWCNT synthesis device to conduct the experiment more quickly and stably. (Patent applied) The horizontal type has the advantage of being able to maintain a low injection nozzle temperature even at 1300 degrees and recover samples even at high residual heat of 400 degrees, allowing many experiments to be performed in a short period of time. Through this, we have developed a production rate per unit volume that is 7 times higher than that of our competitors in just one year.
SWCNTs synthesized using newly developed equipment are made with 65% purity and IG/ID = 35. This can be seen as a fatal drawback for production as the catalyst content is 10% higher than that of competitors. However, we developed a process technology that allows only pure SWCNTs to be synthesized even when an excessive amount of catalyst is added, and we chose to make a large amount of SWCNTs with an excess amount of catalyst and leave a lot of catalyst remaining.
Through this, we have secured a SWCNT production speed that is 7 times higher than that of our competitors and developed a technology that has increased our price competitiveness by more than 30% compared to our competitors.
E-Cube Materials is building 210 kg production equipment per year as a pilot plant in 2026, and will supply sufficient samples to customers after September.
In addition, we plan to develop mass production equipment of which capacity is 1.3 tons per year in 2027, and begin mass production with an annual production capacity of 13 tons in 2028.
