Abstract
Herein we present an inexpensive facile wet‐chemistry‐free approach to the transfer of chemical vapour‐deposited multiwalled carbon nanotubes to flexible transparent polymer substrates in a single‐step process. By controlling the nanotube length, we demonstrate accurate control over the electrical conductivity and optical transparency of the transferred thin films. Uniaxial strains of up to 140% induced only minor reductions in sample conductivity, opening up a number of applications in stretchable electronics. Nanotube alignment offers enhanced functionality for applications such as polarisation selective electrodes and flexible supercapacitor substrates. A capacitance of 17 F/g was determined for supercapacitors fabricated from the reported dry‐transferred MWCNTs with the corresponding cyclic voltagrams showing a clear dependence on nanotube length.
Highlights
Carbon nanotubes, one-dimensional high aspect ratio carbon allotropes, have received significant interest in the past two decades as a viable candidate material to replace the industry pervading, and increasingly expensive, transparent conductor, indium tin oxide (ITO)
A capacitance of 17 F/g was determined for supercapacitors fabricated from the reported dry-transferred Multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) with the corresponding cyclic voltagrams showing a clear dependence on nanotube length
The conductivity is critically dependent on the number of conduction pathways, junctions, and the general network morphology—all of which can be varied by adjusting the nanotube length and degree of alignment
Summary
One-dimensional high aspect ratio carbon allotropes, have received significant interest in the past two decades as a viable candidate material to replace the industry pervading, and increasingly expensive, transparent conductor, indium tin oxide (ITO). Carbon nanotube networks are extremely flexible [1,2,3], highly conductive [4,5,6] and offer impressive optical transparency [4, 7,8,9]. Direct nanotube deposition on polymers necessitates substantial reductions in growth temperatures This most often results in the deposition of inflexible pyramidal carbon nanofibres [11] rather than highly graphitic and conductive nanotubes. Nanotube alignment has been demonstrated in a number of ways [15,16,17] though solution processing produces isotropic networks lacking the advantageous structural anisotropy associated with the initial as-grown one-dimensional nanostructures. Simple supercapacitor structures have been demonstrated as one viable application of the proposed technique
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