Fluidic Properties of Carbon Nanotube Inks and Field Emission Properties of Ink Jet-Printed Emitters

Abstract

To use carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in electronic devices, CNT solutions were created and adapted for jet-printing Printing the devices requires characterizing and understanding CNT solutions. In this paper, we prepare aqueous CNT solutions with typical surfactants, sodium dodecyl sulfonate (SDS) and sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate (NaDDBS), and a polymeric surfactant, Nation The fluidic properties, key parameters for printing, and correlations between CNT solutions and device performance were investigated We used ink-jet printing to create field emission arrays (FEAs) Our approach is vacuum-friendly, easily scalable and controls structural factors such as dot size, dot-dot separation, and emitter density.