Electronic Properties of Carbon Nanotubes 34The alignment of CNTs in a variety of matrices can be used to reinforce, intensify, and enhance some of the properties of the resulting systems, as well as introduce various degrees of anisotropy into the properties of the desired nanomaterials (Kimura et al., 2002;Garmestani et al., 2003). The alignment of CNTs in a suspension under a magnetic field requires that the energy produced by the torque acting on a magnetically-anisotropic segment exceeds the thermal energy of that particular segment, such that:, where B is the field strength, n is the number of carbon atoms in the segment, and is the magnetic anisotropy (Fisher et al., 2003). However, due to the low magnetic susceptibility of CNTs, their alignment by the application of an external magnetic field requires a relatively high magnetic field (Camponeschi et al., 2007). This drawback could be eliminated by enhancing the magnetic susceptibility of carbon nanotubes via the tethering of magnetic nanoparticles onto their surface. In zero field, the magnetic moments of the maghemite nanoparticles randomly point in different directions, resulting in a vanishing net magnetization. However, if a sufficient homogeneous magnetic field is applied, the magnetic moments of the nanoparticles align in parallel, and the resulting dipolar interactions are sufficiently large to overcome thermal motion and to reorient the magnetic CNTs.In this chapter, we describe and report a convenient approach for the decoration of CNTs with near-monodisperse maghemite nanoparticles by employing a novel and simple modified sol-gel process (in-situ process) with a n i r o n s a l t a s p r e c u r s o r , f o l l o w e d b y calcination. The resulting hybrid nanomaterials are superparamagnetic at room temperature and are conducive to facile alignment under relatively low magnetic fields. Subsquently, the nanohybrid materials, i.e. the magnetized carbon nanotubes, were incorporated into a polymer matrix and aligned by the application of a magnetic field, forming polymer composites with an aligned filler phase. It is therefore expected that the composites formed in this manner would exhibit anisotropic mechanical and electrical properties that would depend on and correlate with the parallel and perpendicular direction to the magnetic field that has been applied and under which the alignment has taken place.
Experimental details 2.1 Synthesis of maghemite-MWCNT nanohybrid materialsPure-MWCNTs were first dispersed in a solution mixture of concentrated H 2 SO 4 and HNO 3 with the volume ratio of 3:1. The suspension was ultra-sonicated for 3 hrs at room temperature. After that, the concentration of the suspension was diluted up to 50% and filtered with a PTFE membrane (0.45 μm pore size) with the aid of a vacuum pump. Carboxylated MWCNT (MWCNT-COOH) was washed with de-ionized water several times to reach neutral pH and dried under vacuum at 50 °C overnight. The synthesis of maghemite-MWCNT was performed by first adding 0.65 g Fe(NO 3 ) 3 ·9H 2 O to ...