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, Nafion. 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.