ABSTRACT
Remarkable size-and structure-dependent properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are attractive for various potential applications, ranging from conducting wires in molecular devices to multifunctional fillers in nanocomposites, etc. To realize the potentials of CNTs in practical realities, some important barriers such as CNT cost, polydispersity in CNT type, and limitation in processing and assembly techniques should be hurdled beforehand. This chapter focuses on the topic of Assembly of CNTs, which is defined as the alignment and/ or patterning of CNTs. To achieve the best possible performance of many CNT applications, especially electronic applications, people have to assemble CNTs into hierarchical arrays over large-scale areas with controllable shape, location, orientation, and density of the
CNTs. Efforts from both the scientific and engineering viewpoints have been made to address this issue since discovery of CNTs. We review here the progress of CNT-assembly techniques in the last five years under the two rubrics of synthetic assembly and postsynthetic assembly. A few nanotechnology applications of such CNT assemblies are illustrated on occasion.
