Canatu and Denso announced Thursday they have started up their new, jointly developed carbon nanotube (CNT) reactor at Canatu’s factory in Finland.
The reactor was designed to scale up production of CNT film, particularly for the automotive industry’s advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) market, where demand has been increasing. Canatu makes CNT film heaters for ADAS cameras and lidar.
The two companies signed an agreement to jointly develop high-performance reactors for CNT film manufacturing in May 2021. The program has focused on improving reactor design, process controls and serviceability. Canatu says key design changes included sizing up the reactor and its components as well as implementing a novel parallel furnace design to multiply the synthesis process yield.
A key obstacle in producing carbon nanotubes has been controlling their growth and variation during mass production, Canatu notes. The company says its joint development with Denso has helped in scaling and controlling the chemistry of Canatu’s propriety CNT synthesis process. And this helps lead to large-scale production with consistent quality, it says. With the new reactor, the two firms can triple throughput. The new reactor has built-in monitoring of carbon nanotube growth and a new collection chamber design, and together those features ensure low ADAS heater-to-heater variation.
The new reactor will be expanded into a reactor platform for next-generation CNT products. Canatu has been mass producing CNT film since 2015.
“We have fine-tuned our own process to ensure consistent quality,” Taneli Juntunen, Canatu’s vice president of engineering, says in Thursday’s release. “With the new high-performance reactor, we will take a giant leap forward in industrial-scale carbon nanotube film manufacturing, benefiting customers with cost competitive products.”
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