Properties and Potential Applications
Inorganic nanotubes are an alternative material to better-explored carbon nanotubes, showing advantages such as easy synthetic access and high crystallinity, good uniformity and dispersion, predefined electrical conductivity depending on the composition of the starting material and needle-like morphology, good adhesion to a number of polymers and high impact-resistance. They are therefore promising candidates as fillers for polymer composites with enhanced thermal, mechanical, and electrical properties. Target applications for this kind of composites are materials for heat management, electrostatic dissipaters, wear protection materials, photovoltaic elements, etc. Inorganic nanotubes are heavier than carbon nanotubes and not as strong under tensile stress, but they are particularly strong under compression, leading to potential applications in impact-resistant applications such as bulletproof vests.
The mechanical strength of cellulose fibers can be increased by an order of magnitude by adding only 0.1 wt% of TMCH nanotubes, and measurements of electrical conductivity of polycaprolactone doped with TMCH nanotubes revealed a percolative behavior with an extremely low percolation threshold. The addition of WS2 nanotubes to epoxy resin improved adhesion, fracture toughness and strain energy release rate. The wear of the nanotubes-reinforced epoxy was eight times lower than that of pure epoxy. WS2 nanotubes were also embedded into a poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) nanofiber matrix via electrospinning. The nanotubes were well dispersed and aligned along fiber axis. The enhanced stiffness and toughness of PMMA fiber meshes by means of inorganic nanotubes addition may have potential applications as impact-absorbing materials.
Optical properties of semiconductor quantum dot-inorganic nanotube hybrids reveal efficient resonant energy transfer from the quantum dot to the inorganic nanotubes upon photoexcitation. Nanodevices based on one-dimensional nanomaterials are thought for next-generation electronic and photoelectronic systems having small size, faster transport speed, higher efficiency and less energy consumption. A high-speed photodetector for visible and near-infrared light based on individual WS2 nanotubes has been prepared in laboratory. Inorganic nanotubes are hollow and can be filled with another material, to preserve or guide it to a desired location or generate new properties in the filler material which is confined within a nanometer-scale diameter. To this goal, inorganic nanotube hybrids were made by filling WS2 nanotubes with molten lead, antimony or bismuth iodide salt by a capillary wetting process, resulting in PbI2@WS2, SbI3@WS2 or BiI3@WS2 core-shell nanotubes.
Read more about this topic: Inorganic Nanotube
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