Large area, highly transparent carbon nanotube spiderwebs for energy harvesting

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes possess excellent electronic properties, and when self-assembled into thin films, they form conductive and transparent networks that are useful for many applications. Here, we synthesized large-area (100 cm²) spiderwebs consisting of interconnected single-walled nanotubes by floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition and a solvent-induced condensation process. These spiderwebs are sticky and robust, can be directly deposited or transferred to various materials and structures such as metal, paper, texture surface, and micro carbon fibers. The spiderwebs offer tunable transparency in the range up to 95%, and show enhanced conductivity compared with most of previous directly grown or post treatment films. Serving as transparent electrodes of solar cells, the nanotube spiderwebs can extract charge carriers from industrial semiconductors with a power conversion efficiency of 7.3% under AM 1.5 G, 100 mW cm⁻² illumination.