High-purity semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (s-SWNTs) with little contaminations are desired for high-performance electronic devices. Although conjugated polymer wrapping has been demonstrated as a powerful and scalable strategy for enriching s-SWNTs, this approach suffers from significant contaminations by polymer residues and high cost of conjugated polymers. Here, we present a simple but general approach using removable and recoverable conjugated polymers for separating s-SWNTs with little polymer contamination. A conjugated polymer with imine linkages was synthesized to demonstrate this concept. Moreover, the SWNTs used are without pre-purifications and very low cost. The polymer exhibits strong dispersion for large-diameter s-SWNTs with high yield (23.7%) and high selectivity (99.7%). After s-SWNT separation, the polymer can be depolymerized into monomers and be cleanly removed under mild acidic conditions, yielding polymer-free s-SWNTs. The monomers can be almost quantitatively recovered to re-synthesize polymer. This approach enables isolation of “clean” s-SWNTs and, at the same time, greatly lowers costs for SWNT separation.

Removable and recyclable conjugated polymers for highly selective and high-yield dispersion and release of low-cost carbon nanotubes

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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