Molecular Evolutionary Growth of Ultralong Semiconducting Double-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.

The self-assembling preparation accompanied with template auto-catalysis loop and the ability to gather energy, induces the appearance of chirality and entropy reduction in biotic systems. However, an abiotic system with biotic characteristics is of great significance but still missing. Here, it is demonstrated that the molecular evolution is characteristic of ultralong carbon nanotube preparation, revealing the advantage of chiral assembly through template auto-catalysis growth, stepwise-enriched chirality distribution with decreasing entropy, and environmental effects on the evolutionary growth.

Controllable Preparation and Strengthening Strategies towards High-Strength Carbon Nanotube Fibers.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with superior mechanical properties are expected to play a role in the next generation of critical engineering mechanical materials. Crucial advances have been made in CNTs, as it has been reported that the tensile strength of defect-free CNTs and carbon nanotube bundles can approach the theoretical limit. However, the tensile strength of macro carbon nanotube fibers (CNTFs) is far lower than the theoretical level.

Super-durable ultralong carbon nanotubes.

Fatigue resistance is a key property of the service lifetime of structural materials. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are one of the strongest materials ever discovered, but measuring their fatigue resistance is a challenge because of their size and the lack of effective measurement methods for such small samples. We developed a noncontact acoustic resonance test system for investigating the fatigue behavior of centimeter-long individual CNTs.