Ultrastrong, Foldable, and Highly Conductive Carbon Nanotube Film

Abstract

Preparation of strong, flexible, and multifunctional carbon-based films has attracted considerable interest not only in fundamental research areas but also for industrial applications. We report a binder-free, ultrastrong, and foldable carbon nanotube (CNT) film using aligned few-walled nanotube sheets drawn from spinnable nanotube arrays. The film exhibits tensile strengths up to ∼2 GPa and a Young's modulus up to ∼90 GPa, which is markedly superior to other types of carbon-based films reported, including commercial graphite foils, buckypapers, and graphene-related papers. The film can bear severe bending (even being folded) and shows good structure integrity and negligible change in electric conductivity. The unique structure of the CNT film (good nanotube alignment, high packing density) provides the film with direct and efficient transport paths for electricity. As a flexible charge collector, it favors a magnesium oxide coating to exhibit high charge/discharge rate stability and an excellent electrochemical capacitance close to its theoretical value.

Fabrication and functionalization of carbon nanotube films for high-performance flexible supercapacitors

“…[57,58] Comparing with the CNT film prepared via FCCVD method, the dry-processed aligned CNT films have higher purity and mechanical strength, which make them easier for electrode post-handling and assembly in supercapacitors. [27] Aligned SWCNT film prepared from pushing down VACNT array showed a specific area as high as active carbon, but with a better conductivity and lower content of functional groups, leading to the low self-discharge and ultra-excellent rate performance of the asassembled supercapacitor without other metallic current collectors. [58] This aligned dense CNT film could be also used as the electrodes of supercapacitors and integrated with other energy conversion devices (see Figure 5(d) and 5(e)).…”

Multifunctional nanocomposites reinforced with carbon nanopapers

“…In contrast, CNTs are an ideal candidate for electrodes for these devices because of their unique properties, such as high conductivity, solution processability, flexibility, and the potential for production at low cost. Two main strategies have been implemented to fabricate highly conductive, transparent, stretchable, and flexible CNT of paper: (1) superaligned paper of CNTs drawn from a vertically grown CNT forest (Jiang et al, 2011;Di et al, 2012) and (2) the deposition or embedding of CNTs onto flexible or stretchable substrates such as PET and PDMS. Both of these techniques have shown great promise in using CNTs in next-generation stretchable devices such as pressure and strain sensors, touch screens, loudspeakers, and electrodes used for supercapacitors (Rowell et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2006Zhang et al, , 2014bKim et al, 2006;Hsieh et al, 2010a,b;Lu et al, 2011;Xu et al, 2011).…”

Biomass-Derived, Interconnected and Reticular Carbon Microtubes Electrodes for Symmetric Capacitors

“…Typical supercapacitor electrode materials can be categorized into one-dimensional (1D), two-dimensional (2D), and three-dimensional (3D), depending on the structure for charge transfer. Some examples of these materials are carbon nanotubes [10][11][12][13], graphene [14][15][16][17], carbon nanofiber [18][19][20], and porous carbon [21,22]. Tubular nanostructure offers high surface area with less utilization of mass to encapsulate materials with poor conductivity [23,24] but has low surface area [25] and high contact resistance at the electrode-current collector [26,27].…”