Extremely Elastic Wearable Carbon Nanotube Fiber Strain Sensor for Monitoring of Human Motion.

The increasing demand for wearable electronic devices has made the development of highly elastic strain sensors that can monitor various physical parameters an essential factor for realizing next generation electronics. Here, we report an ultrahigh stretchable and wearable device fabricated from dry-spun carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers. Stretching the highly oriented CNT fibers grown on a flexible substrate (Ecoflex) induces a constant decrease in the conductive pathways and contact areas between nanotubes depending on the stretching distance; this enables CNT fibers to behave as highly sensitive strain sensors.

Suspended heated silicon platform for rapid thermal control of surface reactions with application to carbon nanotube synthesis.

Rapid continuous thermal control of chemical reactions such as those for chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of nanotubes and nanowires cannot be studied using traditional reactors such as tube furnaces, which have large thermal masses. We present the design, modeling, and verification of a simple, low-cost reactor based on resistive heating of a suspended silicon platform. This system achieves slew rates exceeding 100 degrees C/s, enabling studies of rapid heating and thermal cycling.

Force output, control of film structure, and microscale shape transfer by carbon nanotube growth under mechanical pressure.

We demonstrate that a film of vertically aligned multiwall carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can exert mechanical energy as it grows, and in our experiments the average force output is approximately 0.16 nN per CNT, for CNTs having an outer diameter of 9 nm and five walls. The film thickness after a fixed growth time and the alignment of CNTs within the film decrease concomitantly with increasing pressure which is applied by placing a weight on the catalyst substrate prior to growth, and CNTs grown under applied pressure exhibit significant structural faults.

Rapid growth and flow-mediated nucleation of millimeter-scale aligned carbon nanotube structures from a thin-film catalyst.

We discuss the rapid growth of films and lithographically templated microstructures of vertically aligned small-diameter multiwalled carbon nanotubes (VA-MWNTs), by atmospheric-pressure thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of C2H4/H2/Ar on a Fe/Al2O3 catalyst film deposited by electron beam evaporation. The structures grow to 1 mm height in 15 min and reach close to 2 mm in 60 min. The growth rate and final height of CNT microstructures grown from catalyst patterns depend strongly on the local areal density of catalyst, representing a reverse analogue of loading effects which occur in plasma etching processes.