Amorphous phase engineered robust highly conductive carbon film for multifunctional applications in harsh environment

Flexible conductive films find widespread uses in a variety of applications such as electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding, joule heating, and conductors of flexible electronics. However, it remains a great challenge to construct highly conductive films with high flexibility and high structural robustness to harsh conditions. Here, we report a highly conductive carbon film with structural robustness that is fabricated by simply depositing pyrolytic carbon (PyC) outside of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) via a chemical vapor infiltration (CVI) process. We name this strategy as amorphous phase engineering (APE) method. Contributed by the high conductivity of CNTs and the high stability of the sp³ hybridized PyC, the pyrolytic carbon-CNTs (PyC-CNT) film exhibiting simultaneously high electric conductivity (1.26✕10⁵ S/m) and high flexibility (No change in conductivity following 5000 bends at a 2 mm radius) and high structural robustness. We demonstrate the use of PyC-CNT film as efficient joule heating deicing and stable EMI shielding protection (>46 dB with a thickness of 10 μm) even after being subjected to 5 mol/L NaOH solution, 98 % concentrated sulfuric acid as well as 99 % chlorosulfonic acid as long as 45 days.