Simple, Cost-Efficient and High Throughput Method for Separating Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes with Modified Cotton

Abstract Application of carbon nanotubes (CNT) is hampered by the lack of practical methods for separating the raw production mixtures into species with a given structure and properties. In this work, we propose a new, cost effective separation method, suitable for the industrial scale processing of SWCNTs. The separation is afforded by passing a surfactant solution of unsorted CNTs through a column, filled with chemically modified cotton wool. This yields two fractions, heavily enriched with semiconducting and metallic CNTs, respectively. The as-separated fractions are fully characterized by UV-Vis spectroscopy, PL spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and HRTEM.