Properties of Carbon Nanotube Fibers Spun from DNA‐Stabilized Dispersions

Abstract

The fabrication of single‐walled carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers containing (salmon) DNA has been demonstrated. The DNA material has been found to be adequate for dispersing relatively large concentrations (up to 1 % by weight) of carbon nanotubes. These dispersions are better suited for fiber spinning than previously studied dispersions based on conventional surfactants, such as sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). The DNA‐containing fibers were less conductive than the fibers based on SDS, but they were significantly stronger. Considerably increased conductivity was obtained by thermally annealing the CNT/DNA fibers, a process accompanied by a loss in mechanical strength. Smaller improvements in conductivity could be introduced by annealing the carbon nanotubes before fiber production, with no alteration of the fiber mechanical properties. Those CNT/DNA fibers that were mechanically strong and conductive also exhibited good electrochemical behavior and useful capacitance values (up to 7.2 F g–1).

Exploiting high quality PEDOT:PSS–SWNT composite formulations for wet-spinning multifunctional fibers

“…The addition of much lower amount of SWNT while obtaining the high levels of conductivity makes wet-spinning of PEDOT:PSS-SWNT fibers an economical and viable choice. The outstanding electrical conductivity of these fibers places them among the most conducting SWNT-based composite fibers and 14,22,38,39,52 comparable with the most successful SWNT-reinforced composites reported to date. 7,[13][14][15][16]38,[53][54][55][56][57][58][59] …”

“…Several biopolymer-based spinning formulations have been prepared in this manner but those reports did not investigate the effect of nanotube loading in the fiber properties. 13,14,[37][38][39][40] The most commonly employed strategy is wet-spinning a surfactant-based SWNT dispersion into a polymer coagulant. 41 The polymer-SWNT composition of the resultant composite fiber using this latter method could not be precisely controlled and typically results in a CNT loading of $60 wt% (or $0.5 V f ).…”

Liquid‐Phase Exfoliation of Nanotubes and Graphene

“…Additionally, if one chooses, oligonucleotides can be removed using small aromatic molecules such as rhodamine 6G or the complementary DNA strand, once any necessary processing is complete [99] . A variety of different applications, such as fibre spinning [102] ; self-assembled nanotube field-effect transistors [103] ; stabilization of colloidal particles [104] ; chemical sensing [105] ; and both medical diagnostic and biological fields [100,[106][107][108][109] have been investigated for DNA-dispersed SWNTs.…”

The Unlikely Surfactant: DNA as a Ligand for Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes

“…It was then reported that SWCNTs can be solubilized by very long single-stranded DNA (> 1000 nucleotides) produced by amplification (Zhao et al, 2006) and asymmetric polymerase chain reaction, PCR (Liang et al, 2007). Others had found independently that double-stranded DNA can be used to obtain very concentrated suspensions (Barisci et al, 2004), but it is not clear whether denaturation of the duplexes occurred during the solubilization protocol, making single-stranded DNA the relevant species in solution. Studies with single nucleotides, like 2'-deoxyadenosine-5'-diphosphate and 2'-deoxyguanosine-5'-monophosphate, as surfactants also produced fairly concentrated nanotube suspension (Ikeda et al, 2006), but it was not studied in detail what the kinetic stability of these suspensions is.…”