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.