Carbon Nanotubes are cylindrical molecules made up of rolled-up sheets of graphene. These nanotubes can either be single-walled with a diameter of merely 1 nanometer, or multi-walled consisting of many linked nanotubes with diameters reaching more than 100 nanometers. The tubes can also reach up to several micrometers or even millimeters in length.
Carbon nanotubes have many special properties similar to graphene. This is mostly due to their extremely strong chemical bonds and their natural inclination to rope together through chemical forces. These properties make carbon nanotubes have high strength, low weight, high conductivity, and high thermality. Here are the properties in more detail.
- They are very strong (400 times the tensile strength of steel)
- They are very lightweight and about one-sixth the density of steel
- They have better thermal conductivity than diamond
- They are very thin in comparison to their length
- They are very chemically stable unless exposed to intense heat and oxygen
- They have a hollow interior than can be filled with other nanomaterials such as for drug delivery
Overall carbon nanotubes allow graphene to be used efficiently and can be applied to many disciplines as always. Some of which include, materials, catalysts, transistors, sensors, nano inks, electrodes, displays, buckypapers, photonics, optoelectronics, nanomedicine, filtration, etc. So ya pretty much everywhere. Carbon nanotubes seem to be one of the most important nano molecules.
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