Nanomaterials have the wind in their sails. Producing them is nonetheless a demanding task. Professor Jean-Paul Pirard’s team have developed a chemical reactor that has allowed the Nanocyl company to produce very high quality carbon nanotubes in industrial quantities.

The reputation of Professor Jean-Paul Pirard in the field of chemical reactors was already well established when he was contacted in 1999 by Professor Janos B. Nagy, of the Facultés Notre-Dame de la Paix at Namur. The latter explained that he had invented a catalyst to make carbon nanotubes using acetylene. ‘Can you construct a reactor for me?’ asked the Namur researcher. For the Liège engineer this was a problem that was well off the beaten track. It is extremely rare to see a process where a gas is transformed into a solid. ‘It exists, as in the case of PVC, but it is rather rare’, he says.

Two requests for funding credit were sent to the Walloon Region authorities and the European Commission, and this led to Professor Jean-Paul Pirard being able to employ two young researchers: Cédric Gommes and Christophe Bossuot, aided by Patrick Kreit, the department’s seasoned engineer. The team used a method called Catalytic Chemical Vapour Deposition. After all is said and done, ‘we built a prototype which worked tremendously and the demonstration fascinated the decision makers who had been invited to witness it’ says Jean-Paul Pirard triumphantly. The prototype built at Liège was the object of a patent the exclusive rights to which have been handed over to Nanocyl, the renowned spin-off created in the interim at Samberville to produce nanotubes on an industrial scale.

Whilst the laboratory reactor designed at Namur produced several grammes of nanotubes, the Liège prototype produced 100 grammes of them at that point. A pilot reactor inaugurated in March 2005 reached levels of 2kg an hour. At the beginning it was operational during the day for four days a week, then five days a week, and eventually for 24 hours a day. Through accumulated production the first tonne of nanotubes was achieved in September 2006, the second in January of this year and the third in April. Today, an industrial reactor is about to be installed at Nanocyl with the aim of producing what some have called ‘a continuous flow of carbon nanotubes’.