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I was searching for a sol gel method for deposition of carbon nanotube thin films and there aren't too many articles on that. Does anybody know the reason? Is it because Carbon nanotubes are difficult to disperse in many solvents or? Does anyone know if it is possible to effectively use a sol gel method to make a CNT thin film?

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I think it may depend on what you mean by "effectively." I imagine that it would be difficult to get a thin film of oriented CNTs using a sol-gel method, since the gel would necessarily have randomly oriented tubes.

The other potential issue is making the sol-gel in the first place. Unless they are functionalized, carbon nanotubes won't gel in hydrophilic solvents. It might be possible to create gels in hydrophobic solvents, but a quick search didn't turn anything like that up.

This link has a brief description of a typical process - you can see that the idea is to make the sol-gel with something that will gel in aqueous solution first (silica, for example), and then add the nanotubes.

So, if you want pure CNT thin films, that would probably be a lot more difficult.

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