Rice University calculations show they could be highly useful for solar panels

One nanotube could be great for electronics applications, but there’s new evidence that two could be tops.

Rice University engineers already knew that size matters when using single-walled carbon nanotubes for their electrical properties. But until now, nobody had studied how electrons act when confronted with the Russian doll-like structure of multiwalled tubes.

The Rice lab of materials theorist Boris Yakobson has now calculated the impact of curvature of semiconducting double-wall carbon nanotubes on their flexoelectric voltage, a measure of electrical imbalance between the nanotube’s inner and outer walls.

This affects how suitable nested nanotube pairs may be for nanoelectronics applications, especially photovoltaics.

The theoretical research by Yakobson’s Brown School of Engineering group appears in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.

– See more at Rice News