Abstract Submitted to the    NANOTUBE'06 Conference:

Multifunctional Carbon Nanotube Yarns and Transparent Sheets: Fabrication, Properties, and Applications

Ken Atkinson ¹, Stephen Hawkins ¹, Chi Huynh ¹, Chris Skourtis ¹, Jane Dai ¹, Mei Zhang ², Shaoli Fang ², Anvar Zakhidov ², Sergey Lee, Ali Aliev ², Christopher Williams ², Ray Baughman ²

¹ CSIRO Textile & Fibre Technology
² NanoTech Institute, University of Texas at Dallas

Ken.Atkinson@csiro.au

X. Morphology and Application of Modified Nanotubes

Individual carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have spectacular measured properties that are of great commercial interest. These include over ten-fold higher strength than other comparable materials, a higher thermal conductivity than diamond, a thousand-fold higher current carrying capability than copper, and other fascinating and useful properties. The problem has been the difficulty of assembling many trillions of nanotubes into yarns and sheets that retain the spectacular properties of the individual nanotubes. An approach commonly used involves an initial step of dispersing the carbon nanotubes in either a melt or liquid, which suffers from number problems such as high viscosity at high concentrations, breakage of the nanotubes and the degradation of length-based properties, particularly thermal and electrical transport.

These problems have been circumvented by the development of a new process for the formation of continuous carbon nanotube yarns and transparent sheets. The CNTs are first grown in forests on silicon wafer with a special topology that provides for continuous recruiting of CNTs. Once a continuous assembly of CNTs is formed, it can be twisted to form a yarn, as in spinning of textile fibres like wool or cotton, or it can be used directly as a ribbon or sheet, which has the structure of a fine non-woven textile web.

This solid-state method of assembling CNTs provides a number of important advantages, such as, elimination of breakage of CNTs during dispersion and preservation of length, elimination of residual traces of solvent that decrease electron and phonon transport, and, most significantly, formation of materials consisting almost entirely of CNTs.

The presentation will detail aspects of the solid-state method of production of the electrically conducting yarns and transparent sheets, their properties, and some of the exciting applications that have been identified so far. These will include demonstration that the CNT yarns can be used for cold electron emission displays and intense light sources operating at low potentials, artificial muscles, supercapacitors, and impact-resistant incandescent light sources. The demonstrated uses for CNT sheets include planar sources of polarized broad-band incandescent radiation, microwave welding of plastics to make defrostable windows, sensors having low 1/f noise and low temperature dependence, and fabrication of highly elastomeric electrodes.

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