Spray-On Technique Could Bring Carbon Nanotubes to Retailers’ Shelves

Spray-on process could bring carbon nanotubes into food packaging and for use on artificial skin

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Spray-On Technique Could Bring Carbon Nanotubes to Retailers’ Shelves

Carbon nanotubes appear to be getting back some of their glory—after seemingly being eclipsed by graphene—with the news yesterday that an entire computer could be made from the material.  Now researchers at Technische Universität München (TUM) in Germany are continuing the carbon nanotube comeback with a new, inexpensive process that promises to enable their use in a wide range of applications including electronic skin and sensors integrated into food packaging.

The process, which involves simply spraying the carbon nanotubes onto a flexible, plastic substrate, is described in the journal Carbon (“Fabrication of carbon nanotube thin films on flexible substrates by spray deposition and transfer printing”)

"To us it was important to develop an easily scalable technology platform for manufacturing large-area printed and flexible electronics based on organic semiconductors and nanomaterials," said postdoctoral researcher Alaa Abdellah in a press release. "To that end, spray deposition forms the core of our processing technology."

In the food packaging application, the carbon nanotubes would serve as gas sensors. Nanotubes have long proven themselves to be good sensors. They can be made to bind to certain substances, which changes the electrical properties of the nanotubes in a way that can be measured with a high degree of sensitivity.

In practical applications, the carbon-nanotube-enabled plastic would cover a grocery store product like chicken. If the product contained the chemical indicators of, say, salmonella, the packaging would detect them and alert the consumer.

While this sounds great, the obstacle preventing this from becoming a reality has always been cost. Thin-film sensory packaging may make sense for a high-cost item, but for an inexpensive grocery store product, it’s hard to justify an additional cost that may be as much as the product itself. I made this point nearly a decade ago in report I authored titled, "The Future of Nanotechnology in Printing and Packaging".

This doesn’t even take into account the often biased opinion people have about nanotechnology in relation to food.

For these reasons, I recommend that the researchers focus their attention on high-ticket applications such as electronic skin for robotics and bionics. In those applications, they will likely find greater resistance to the fear mongering practiced by the NGOs. And it just might make more economic sense to adopt their technology for those applications.

Image: Uli Benz/TUM

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