Surfactant-free Fabrication of Fullerene C60 Nanotubules Under Shear

Kasturi Vimalanathan; Rekha Goswami Shrestha; Zhi Zhang; Jin Zou; Tomonobu Nakayama; Colin L Raston

doi:10.1002/anie.201608673

Surfactant-free Fabrication of Fullerene C₆₀ Nanotubules Under Shear

Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2017 Jul 10;56(29):8398-8401. doi: 10.1002/anie.201608673. Epub 2016 Dec 8.

Authors

Kasturi Vimalanathan¹, Rekha Goswami Shrestha², Zhi Zhang³, Jin Zou³, Tomonobu Nakayama^{2

4}, Colin L Raston¹

Affiliations

¹ Flinders Centre for NanoScale Science Technology (CNST) Chemical and Physical Sciences, Flinders University, Bedford Park, Adelaide, 5001, Australia.
² International Centre for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-0044, Japan.
³ Materials Engineering and Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia.
⁴ Graduate School of Pure and Applied Sciences, University of Tsukuba, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-0044, Japan.

PMID: 27930851
DOI: 10.1002/anie.201608673

Abstract

A method for controlling the self-assembly of fullerene C₆₀ molecules into nanotubules in the fcc phase, devoid of entrapped solvent, has been established in a thin film microfluidic device. The micron length C₆₀ nanotubules, with individual hollow diameters of 100 to 400 nm, are formed under continuous flow processing during high shear micromixing of water and a toluene solution of the fullerene, in the absence of surfactant, and without the need for further down-stream processing. TEM revealed pores on the surface of the nanotubes, and the isolated material has a much higher response to small molecule sensing than that for analogous material formed using multistep batch processing.

Keywords: fullerenes; microfluidics; nanotubules; self-assembly; shear.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't