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Materials

'Nano Skins' Made From Polymer, Nanotubes

by Bethany Halford
April 17, 2006 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 84, Issue 16

APS Meeting News

A new hybrid material made from aligned carbon nanotubes and a soft polymer has been reported by Pulickel M. Ajayan's group at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. These flexible, conducting "nano skins" have a number of potential applications, according to the researchers, including conducting components in electronic paper and chemical sensors.

"Researchers have long been interested in making composites of nanotubes and polymers, but it can be difficult to engineer the interfaces between the two materials," Ajayan said. The aligned arrays of nanotubes produced during high-temperature chemical vapor deposition synthesis tend to lose their shape when they're transferred to other substrates.

Ajayan and colleagues managed to get around this problem by taking a nanotube array grown on a substrate that tolerates high temperatures and filling that array with a soft polymer. Once the polymer hardens, it can be peeled away from its original substrate. The resulting nano skins can be twisted, bent, and rolled up into scrolls without losing their ability to conduct electricity.

"What is interesting about this is that we can transfer ordered arrays of nanotubes without disturbing the alignment," Ajayan explained. "This is the first time we were able to take a pattern and get a replica of that pattern on a polymer."

Ajayan thinks the technique offers a general protocol for transferring nanotubes with their aligned structure intact. He reasons that almost any polymer could be used in the technique, as long as it isn't too viscous.

"The general concept—growing nanotubes on a stiff platform in various organizations and then transferring them to a flexible platform without losing this organization—could have many applications, all the way from adhesive structures and Velcrolike materials to nanotube interconnects for electronics," added Swastik Kar, a postdoc in Ajayan's lab.

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