A STEP-and-GROW Technique - An Economic and Environmentally Safe Manufacturing Approach for Fabricating Ordered Nano Structures

摘要

A new variant of our "grow-in-place" methodology termed "step-and-grow" is used to produce polyaniline nanowires. Three different widths (5 μm, 1 μm, and 0.5 μm) of nanowires were grown for this demonstration. These "step-and-grow" polyaniline nanowires showed conductivities of ～ 10 S/cm. The future success of nanotechnology lies in the ability to manufacture in large volumes in an economical and environmentally sound manner. This is central to the evolution and pervasive application of nanotechnology. Over the past several years considerable progress has been made in the synthesis of bulk nano powders, tubes, wires, rods, and fibers, among other geometries. However, progress is only truly achieved when these building blocks are assembled into useful systems. Many approaches have been proposed to achieve this objective. Often these are based on using direct pick and place, microfluidic assisted alignment, or electric field induced alignment assembly. However, such techniques are not practical and usually time consuming. In addition, the techniques are not environmentally safe since only few out of a large number of grown nanostructures are used for the assembly and the unused nanostructures are discarded.