Macroscopic, Neat, Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Fibers
Lars M. Ericson,1,2
Hua Fan,1,2
Haiqing Peng,1,2
Virginia A. Davis,1,3
Wei Zhou,5
Joseph Sulpizio,1,2
Yuhuang Wang,1,2
Richard Booker,1,2
Juraj Vavro,5
Csaba Guthy,5
A. Nicholas G. Parra-Vasquez,1,3
Myung Jong Kim,1,2
Sivarajan Ramesh,1,2
Rajesh K. Saini,1,4
Carter Kittrell,1,2
Gerry Lavin,6
Howard Schmidt,1,2
W. Wade Adams,1,2
W. E. Billups,1,4
Matteo Pasquali,1,3
Wen-Fang Hwang,1,2*
Robert H. Hauge,1,2
John E. Fischer,5
Richard E. Smalley1,2*
Well-aligned macroscopic fibers composed solely of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) were produced by conventional spinning. Fuming sulfuric acid charges SWNTs and promotes their ordering into an aligned phase of individual mobile SWNTs surrounded by acid anions. This ordered dispersion was extruded via solution spinning into continuous lengths of macroscopic neat SWNT fibers. Such fibers possess interesting structural composition and physical properties.
1 Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
2 Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
3 Department of Chemical Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
4 Department of Chemistry, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
5 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
6 Carbon Consultations, 15 Wellesley Road, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: whwang{at}rice.edu (W.F.H.); smalley{at}rice.edu (R.E.S.)
