Owing to their remarkable properties (electrical, mechanical, thermal and optical), carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have shown great potential for implementation both in microscopic electronic devices (e.g. field transistors, field emitters, nano-sensors), and macroscopic applications (filtration materials, structural materials, conductors, electrode materials and composites).
To date however, most of the latter applications use disorganized CNTs, which as a result of their random orientation, entanglement and aggregation have poor overall properties. For example, CNTs are extremely attractive filter materials because of their intrinsic properties (e.g. large surface area, sorption of a wide range of pollutants, etc.). The use of powdered CNTs is not pursued as a scalable approach in water remediation because of the difficult recovery of the particles after filtration. A popular alternative is to work with immobilized CNT membranes, referred to as buckypapers. However, because of the random orientation of the CNTs, these do not allow control on geometry, porosity and pore shape, thus suffering from low permeability or low filter capacity.
The production and commercialization of CNT based products is dependent on the possibility of designing and preparing hierarchically-structured CNT assemblies where the CNTs are synergistically collaborating to a real enhancement of the device’s characteristics, with minimal reciprocal perturbation. Tremendous efforts have been deployed for the production of CNT-based macroscopic assemblies, including: 1D yarns or fibers, 2D films, 3D gels and vertically aligned arrays. But their standardized continuous fabrication approach does not allow for the fine-tuning of their structure, and consequently their properties, for integration in composites and devices. A more versatile manufacturing processwould be desirable to achieve the necessary design flexibility required to overcome this limitation.
Supra-CNT project defines a new methodology to precisely and deterministically engineer the order, morphology, and porosity of CNT assemblies at several length scales. At the interface between top-down and bottom-up approaches, Supra-CNT provides exceptional control of CNT manufacturing by addressing: the engineering of the single particles (i.e. surface chemistry); their controlled aggregation into definite microparticles; and the large-scale assembly of the latter, unlocking the preparation of unprecedented macroscopic hierarchized high-tech specialized CNT materials.
