Double-walled carbon nanotubes are better than single-walled, when turning carbon nanotubes into materials like strong, conductive fibres or transistors, and for other electrical uses, according to a research report by Rice University.
Rice materials scientist Enrique Barrera and his colleagues used atomic-level models of double-walled nanotubes to see how they might be tuned for applications that require particular properties. They found it may someday be possible to tune double-walled tubes for specific electronic properties by controlling their configuration, chiral angles, and the distance between the walls, according to a press release.
Carbon nanotubes, grown by various methods, come in two basic varieties: single-walled and multi-walled. But double-walled tubes hold a special place in the hierarchy because they behave somewhat like single-walled tubes but are stronger and better able to survive extreme conditions.
As the electrical properties of single-walled tubes depend on their chirality, the angles of their hexagonal arrangement of atoms, the researchers thought it would be interesting to learn more about those properties in double-walled tubes.
They determined that semiconducting nanotubes wrapped around metallic, highly conductive nanotubes could be the best candidates for tuning the band gap, the property that defines the value of a semiconductor. It’s not yet possible to do so, but the ability to adjust the distance between walls may lead to nanotube transistors, according to the research team.Other nanotube configurations may be best for turning into macroscopic carbon nanotube conducting wires, particularly with metallic-metallic nanotubes, the researchers informed.
The Department of Energy’s Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, the Mexican government’s CONACyT program and the state of Nuevo León funded the research. The researchers utilized the National Science Foundation-supported DAVinCI supercomputer administered by Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. (GK)
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