Evaporation induced self-assembled structures of carbon nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are one-dimensional carbon materials and have remarkable mechanical and electrical properties. However, dispersion CNTs and fabrication well-ordered structure of CNTs remain major challenges. In this study, we developed a fabrication method of self-assembled structures of CNTs in thin films by dispersion and droplet evaporation technique. In dispersion process, CNTs were wrapped by suitable dispersants to weaken van der Waals interaction between bundled CNTs. In evaporation process, we fabricated ordered structure of CNTs by controlling evaporation rate, surface wettability and solute concentration of droplets. We demonstrated that we can fabricate various self-assembled structure of CNTs by proposed method.