Dry-Transfer of Aligned Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes for Flexible Transparent Thin Films

Abstract EN

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.