Gas sensing with liquid deposited carbon nanotube networks

COLL 7

Marcus D. Lay, mlay@chem.uga.edu and Pornnipa Vichchulada. Department of Chemistry, University of Georgia, 1001 Cedar St., Athens, GA 30602
A novel method of creating ordered 2-D arrays of purified CNTs has been exploited to attain a higher level reproducibility in CNT-based applications. Unidirectional airflow was used to order CNTs in aqueous suspension and deposit them on a surface at low density, resulting in an electrically continuous array of highly aligned CNTs. These networks of CNTs exhibit anisotropic electrical conductivity over macroscopic lengths (up to 3”), and have shown great promise in sensor and field-effect transistor (FET) applications. Density control in these CNT arrays is obtained by varying the number of CNTs in suspension and/or the number of deposition cycles. The major advantage of this method is that the solution deposition process decouples the growth process (occurring at ~800° C) from the deposition process (occurring at R.T.). This enables deposition on heat sensitive substrates, and allows purification of CNT material prior to device formation. Gas sensing studies will be presented.