Nanotube Alignment Mechanism in Floating Evaporative Self-Assembly
The challenge of assembling semiconducting single-wall carbon nanotubes (s-SWCNTs) into densely packed, aligned arrays has limited the scalability and practicality of high-performance nanotube-based electronics technologies. The aligned deposition of s-SWCNTs via floating evaporative self-assembly (...
| Veröffentlicht in: | Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids. - 1992. - 33(2017), 46 vom: 21. Nov., Seite 13407-13414 |
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| 1. Verfasser: | |
| Weitere Verfasser: | , , , , , , |
| Format: | Online-Aufsatz |
| Sprache: | English |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2017
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| Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk: | Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids |
| Schlagworte: | Journal Article Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S. |
| Zusammenfassung: | The challenge of assembling semiconducting single-wall carbon nanotubes (s-SWCNTs) into densely packed, aligned arrays has limited the scalability and practicality of high-performance nanotube-based electronics technologies. The aligned deposition of s-SWCNTs via floating evaporative self-assembly (FESA) has promise for overcoming this challenge; however, the mechanisms behind FESA need to be elucidated before the technique can be improved and scaled. Here, we gain a deeper understanding of the FESA process by studying a stationary analogue of FESA and optically tracking the dynamics of the organic ink/water/substrate and ink/air/substrate interfaces during the typical FESA process. We observe that the ink/water interface serves to collect and confine the s-SWCNTs before alignment and that the deposition of aligned bands of s-SWCNTs occurs at the ink/water/substrate contact line during the depinning of both the ink/air/substrate and ink/water/substrate contact lines. We also demonstrate improved control over the interband spacing, bandwidth, and packing density of FESA-aligned s-SWCNT arrays. The substrate lift rate (5-15 mm min-1) is used to tailor the interband spacing from 90 to 280 μm while maintaining a constant aligned s-SWCNT bandwidth of 50 μm. Varying the s-SWCNT ink concentration (0.75-10 μg mL-1) allows the control of the bandwidth from 2.5 to 45 μm. A steep increase in packing density is observed from 11 s-SWCNTs μm-1 at 0.75 μg mL-1 to 20 s-SWCNTs μm-1 at 2 μg mL-1, with a saturated packing density of ∼24 s-SWCNTs μm-1. We also demonstrate the scaling of FESA to align s-SWCNTs on a 2.5 × 2.5 cm2 scale while preserving high-quality alignment on the nanometer scale. These findings help realize the scalable fabrication of well-aligned s-SWCNT arrays to serve as large-area platforms for next-generation semiconductor electronics |
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| Beschreibung: | Date Completed 31.07.2018 Date Revised 31.07.2018 published: Print-Electronic Citation Status PubMed-not-MEDLINE |
| ISSN: | 1520-5827 |
| DOI: | 10.1021/acs.langmuir.7b02827 |