SBIR Phase I: Spiral Countercurrent Chromatography for the Separation of Carbon Nanotubes

该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力在于可获得实验室规模数量最高纯度的单壁碳纳米管。这将通过使用美国发明和制造的螺旋逆流色谱仪来实现。单壁碳纳米管是最有前景的半导体材料之一，目前正被积极考虑用于制造最先进的高性能电子电路。相关的技术诀窍将对大批量半导体制造行业具有重要价值。通过建议的系统分离的离散手性类型的单壁碳纳米管的可用性将对研究市场产生额外的影响。半导体行业的研究实验室和学术实验室可能能够开发基于碳纳米管的纳米材料、组件和最终产品，用于护理点诊断、基因组学设备以及用于环境和安全识别的传感器。这些潜在应用的社会效益是显著的。这些好处更广泛地延伸到生命科学研究行业，在这些行业，该技术在开发新型疫苗和药物输送方面致力于蛋白质和颗粒的分离。这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目专注于开发一种新的实验室规模的碳纳米管提纯系统。碳纳米管在制造和分离纯净形式以用作先进电子学中坚固的逻辑和传感器元件方面具有挑战性。它们是硬晶体碳聚合物，是不同长度和直径的异质管，以单壁或多壁形式存在于其他结构中。现有的溶解和提纯各种单壁半导体物种的工艺相当困难，而且质量产率低。目前使用的方法主要有柱层析法和密度梯度超速离心法。为了满足更高的质量负载和更高的选择性的需要，本方案的重点是发展螺旋逆流色谱。在初步实验中，一种新的螺旋设计转子与聚合物溶剂混合物一起使用，显示出比静态萃取更好的纳米管分级。最近对葡聚糖聚合物液体固定相的创新性研究使进一步提高碳纳米管的分级成为可能。它还为大分子分离开辟了许多令人兴奋的选择。这一发展对层析和半导体研究都具有非常重要的智力价值。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project lies in the availability of single-wall carbon nanotubes in their most highly purified form in laboratory scale quantities. This would be enabled by the use of a spiral countercurrent chromatograph, invented and made in the USA. Single-wall carbon nanotube is one of the most promising semi-conductor materials and is being actively considered for making state-of-the-art high performance electronic circuits. The associated know-how will be of great value to the high volume semi-conductor manufacturing industry. The availability of discrete chiral types of the single-wall carbon nanotubes separated by the proposed system will have additional impact on the research market. Research labs in the semi-conductor industry and academic labs may be able to develop the carbon nanotube based nanomaterials, components and final products for point of care diagnostics, genomics devices and sensors for environmental and security identification. The societal benefits of these potential applications are significant. The benefits extend more broadly to the life science research industry also where the technology works for protein and particle separations in the development of novel vaccines and drug delivery. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on developing a novel laboratory scale system for carbon nanotube purification. Carbon nanotubes are challenging to manufacture and isolate in their pure form for use as robust logic and sensor elements in advanced electronics. They are hard crystal carbon polymers that are heterogeneous tubes of various lengths and diameters and occur as single-walled or multi-walled with other structures. The existing processes to solubilize and purify the various single-walled semi-conductor species are quite difficult and have low mass yields. The methods mostly used to date are column chromatography and density gradient ultracentrifugation. To meet the need of higher mass loading and increased selectivity, this proposal focuses on developing spiral countercurrent chromatography. A new spiral design rotor used with a polymer solvent mix has shown improved nanotube fractionation over static extraction in preliminary experiments. Recent innovative research on dextran polymer liquid stationary phase makes it possible to improve the fractionation of carbon nanotubes even further. It also opens up many exciting options for large molecule separation. This development has a very significant intellectual merit for both chromatography and semi-conductor research.