Development of n-type cobaltocene-encapsulated carbon nanotubes with remarkable thermoelectric property.

Direct conversion from heat to electricity is one of the important technologies for a sustainable society since large quantities of energy are wasted as heat. We report the development of a single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT)-based high conversion efficiency, air-stable and flexible thermoelectric material. We prepared cobaltocene-encapsulated SWNTs (denoted CoCp2@SWNTs) and revealed that the material showed a negative-type (n-type) semiconducting behaviour (Seebeck coefficient: -41.

Effects of the chemical structure of polyfluorene on selective extraction of semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes.

The selective recognition/extraction of semiconducting (sem)- and metallic (met)-single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) is still a great challenge in the science and technology of carbon nanotubes because their selective synthesis is still difficult. Poly(9,9-dioctyl-fluorene-2,7-diyl) (2C8-PF) and its derivatives are widely used polymers in carbon nanotube science and technology since they only extract sem-SWNTs from the mixture of sem-/met-SWNTs, while the separation mechanism is still unclear. In this study, we focus on the alkyl chain number on the polyfluorenes (PFs) to understand the mechanism for selective recognition.