Controlled growth of carbon nanotubes on patterned substrates

• Main Author: Li, Bing
• Other Authors: Zhang Hua
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Materials
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/20860
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs), the 1D carbon nanomaterials, have attracted tremendous interest since its discovery. The unique structures and properties of SWCNTs made them the attractive building blocks for various promising applications, such as field emitters, field effect transistors, sensors, diodes and inter-connection, etc. The realization of such fundamental studies and advanced applications will be largely dependent on whether the tubes can be organized into ordered arrays with defined locations, orientations and densities, etc. Controlled growth of CNTs from patterned catalyst sites has become a choice for producing such CNT arrays. Since the directly grown tubes are free from the harsh post-growth experimental treatments, they preserve the original structures and intrinsic properties. In order to study the growth mechanism for further controlling the CNT growth, and to meet the needs of particular requirements of CNT arrays in the wide range of basic studies and advanced applications, in this thesis, three strategies for efficiently generating catalyst patterns on substrates for controlled growth of CNTs have been developed. Also the direct fabrication of all-carbon devices, based on the controlled growth of long-aligned SWCNTs to cross and connect the pre-patterned reduced graphene oxide (RGO) electrodes, was demonstrated.