Assembly of Carbon Nanotube Sheets

Abstract

Over the past decades, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been actively explored as building blocks for next-generation electronics (Tans et al., 1998; Bachtold et al., 2001; Misewich et al., 2003), optoelectronics, and sensors (Kong et al., 2000; Xia et al., 2003; T. Zhang, 2008), including flexible and transparent devices ( Ju et al., 2007) as well as stretchable devices (Xu et al., 2011). A critical step in constructing CNT-based devices is assembly of CNTs on a substrate or free-standing for device fabrication, which include alignment, density control, and transfer. Scalable and controlled assembly of CNTs synthesized with diverse methods (e.g., solution fabrication or solid-state fabrication methods) on diverse substrates (e.g., silicon, plastics, rubbers, etc) or free-standing presents a major fabrication challenge that must be overcome if CNTs are to be utilized in practical applications. For assembling CNTs into thin films (or called sheet, buckypaper), there are several different methods or processes in different conditions (e.g., solution or solid-state processes) (Hu et al., 2010). Solution processes start with the CNTs in powder form; the powder is dispersed in an appropriate solvent with or without functionalization. The CNT films (buckypapers) are usually made using versions of the ancient art of paper making, by typically long-time filtration of nanotubes dispersed in solvent and peeling the dried nanotubes as a layer from the filter (Rinzler et al., 1998; Endo et al., 2005). Buckypaper normally has a laminar structure with a random orientation of the bundles of the nanotubes in the plane of the film (Berhan et al., 2004). Interesting variations of the filtration route provide ultra-thin nanotube sheets that are highly transparent and highly conductive (Wu et al., 2004; Hu et al., 2004). While filtration-produced sheets are normally isotropic within the sheet plane, sheets having partial nanotube alignment result from applying high magnetic fields during filtration (Fischer et al., 2003). In other important advances, nanotube films have been fabricated by Langmuir-Blodgett deposition (Y. Kim et al., 2003), casting from oleum (Sreekumar et al., 2003), coating (Ago et al., 1999; Dan et al., 2009), and printing (Zhou et al., 2006; Unidym Inc, 2007). The solid-state processes generally have two approaches. One is to synthesize CNTs by floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition (CVD), either to deposit CNTs on a substrate inside the CVD chamber or to collect the CNT aerogel outside of the chamber on a special substrate and then densify it into a film (Y. Li et al., 2004; Martin, 2010). The catalysts are with the CNTs and the CNTs in the film are usually disoriented. The optimized process control lowers the impurities to less than 5 wt% in the film and a 1.2 meter wide and 10 meter long CNT film has been made (Nanocomp Tech. 2010). The other approach is to