Toppling, Flattening, and Printing Carbon Nanotube Dominos

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are efficiently grown in a process of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) as vertically aligned "forests" from arrays of catalyst nanoparticles on a silicon wafer. These forests are commonly grown with billions of CNTs/cm2, but this is still below a packing density required for relevant applications. The University of Michigan Lab can produce vertically-grown CNT "dominos", which are an array of CNT forests up to 2mm tall, with a base area of up to 1x5mm. Our goal is to transform the CNT dominos to a horizontally aligned position, condense them fifty times, and to transfer the toppled and condensed dominos to other substrates. It is also desirable to be able to transfer the processed CNTs to the same substrate while maintaining their preprocessed pattern.