A comprehensive characterization of various carbon nanotube (CNT) yarns provides insight for producing high-performance CNT yarns as well as a useful guide to select the proper yarn for a specific application. Herein we systematically investigate the correlations between the physical properties of six CNT yarns produced by three spinning methods, and their structures and the properties of the constituent CNTs. The electrical conductivity increases in all yarns regardless of the spinning method as the effective length of the constituent CNTs and the density of the yarns increase. On the other hand, the tensile strength shows a much stronger dependence on the packing density of the yarns than the CNT effective length, indicating the relative importance of the interfacial interaction. The contribution of each physical parameter to the yarn properties are quantitatively analyzed by partial least square regression.
Keywords: carbon nanotubes; electrical conductivity; nanotube length; tensile strength; yarn.