Advisory Committee Chair
Daneesh O Simien
Advisory Committee Members
Haibin Ning
Clayton E Simien
Derrick Dean
Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
2018
Degree Name by School
Master of Science in Materials Engineering (MSMtE) School of Engineering
Abstract
This thesis is dedicated to exploring the separation technique of single wall carbon nanotube (SWNTs). Limited by the commercial synthesis method and required by the self-repaired nanocomposites project, the SWNTs was separated by length and chirality. In length separation, the density gradient ultracentrifugation (DGU) technique was applied. We have optimized the processing procedure for sorting single wall carbon nanotubes by length. A good length distribution was obtained from ~600nm to ~60 nm by layers. A new approach, aqueous two-phase separation (ATPS), was used for metallic-semiconducting separation of SWNTs. We studied the surfactants’ influence in a two-phase system, polyethylene glycol (PEG) – dextran solution, for isolating single chirality. Three types of semiconducting SWNTs were isolated, including (7, 5), (8,4), (9, 4); and one metallic SWNTs, (6, 6), was obtained. We found the concentration of surfactant could control the separation behavior, as the concentration of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) increasing smaller diameter of SWNTs will be partition into PEG phase. The effective SDS concentration was ~0.9wt% to ~ 1.6wt% while kept the DOC concentration under 0.04wt%. The sodium cholate (SC) was added to further separate the metallicsemiconducting SWNTs from the diameter groups of SWNTs.
Recommended Citation
Chen, Chunxu, "Progress Towards The Study Of Self-Repaired Nanocomposites: Generating Single Chirality Species Of Metallic Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes" (2018). All ETDs from UAB. 1369.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/1369