Direct Injection Carbon Nanotubes Thin Film Deposition System

CNTs have been applied in many advanced devices because it can form uniform monolayers of highly conductive thin film. The thin layer of CNTs can be a platform to develop a sensor. In order to create a thin layer CNT thin film, deposition is needed. There are different deposition methods like dip coating, drop casting, thermal evaporation and spray coating. Spray coating is the most promising method because it is simple, scalable, and fast, resulting in homogeneously continuous and thin layers of CNTs thin film. However, there is no standard deposition system to control the spray coating parameters for direct injection deposition method currently. Also, lack of data on the spraying setting and parameter to spray a uniform CNTs thin film using artist airbrush. This paper presents the development of a deposition system based on airbrush spray coating technique to form thin and uniform CNTs thin films. Development of the deposition system consists of electronic hardware based on Arduino microcontroller which is integrated with mechanical hardware structures designed with 3D printing. The program software is developed through the Arduino IDE application. The system is integrated and tested for functionality and validation of the developed programming’s correct operation. Based on the experiment done, the average thickness of the thin film obtained is 4.12nm. The optimum spraying setting is established to produce a uniform monolayer of highly conductive CNTs thin film. From this work, it is demonstrated that the thin film deposition system was successfully developed and able to produce uniform CNT thin films with the ability to control key spraying parameters such as the amount and concentration of SWCNT.