Abstract. Paper-like carbon nanotube (CNT) materials have many important applications such as in catalysts, in filtration, actuators, capacitor or battery electrodes, and so on. Up to now, the most popular way of preparing buckypapers has involved the procedures of dispersion and filtration of a suspension of CNTs. In this work, we present a simple and effective macroscopic manipulation of aligned CNT arrays called 'domino pushing' in the preparation of the aligned thick buckypapers with large areas. This simple method can efficiently ensure that most of the CNTs are well aligned tightly in the buckypaper. The initial measurements indicate that these buckypapers have better performance on thermal and electrical conductance. These buckypapers with controllable structure also have many potential applications, including supercapacitor electrodes.

Print publication: Issue 7 (20 February 2008)
Received 24 September 2007, in final form 7 December 2007
Published 31 January 2008