Aerosol-jet Printed Preferentially Aligned Carbon Nanotube Twin-line for Printed Electronics

The alignment of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is of great importance for the fabrication of high-speed electronic devices such as a transistor as the electron mobilities can be greatly enhanced with aligned CNT architectures. Here, we report, for the first time, a methodology to obtain preferentially aligned CNT traces on a flexible polyimide substrate utilizing the high-resolution aerosol jet printing technique and evaporation-driven self-assembly process. A self-assembled twin-line of CNT (“coffee-ring” effect) is observed in the deposit patterns, and the field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) images reveal highly self-ordered CNT in the resulting CNT twin-line. Various aerosol jet parameters have been investigated to obtain printed tracks in the range of 30–80 μm and conductive tracks (single CNT twin-line width) in the range of 600–1500 nm. The smallest CNT twin-line obtained in this experiment is found to be approximately 16 μm using a suitable sheath-to-atomizer flow ratio. Image analysis of...