Inkjet printers can produce thin films of carbon nanotubes for use as electrodes in stretchy electronic circuits.
Yongtaek Hong and his colleagues at Seoul National University printed layers of single-walled carbon nanotubes onto a stretchable silicon-based material. The authors found that the electrical properties of the films improved after washing them with water and soaking them in diluted nitric acid. Furthermore, a film with five layers of nanotubes performed better than a single layer, maintaining conductive properties under 100% tensile strain.
This method is simpler and more scalable than previous ones, the authors say.
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Printer squirts out nanotubes. Nature 508, 291 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/508291c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/508291c