I wish to deposit CNT and Cu nanoparticles over a sintered Cu microporous wick and wish to maintain controlled thickness. Any suggestions or link related this is most welcome.
Full dispersion of the CNT's as individuals will be the make or break for this method but also for any other attempt. It seems to me that the suggested method is likely to fail for such highly unsymmetric particles like CNT even if one would be able to have dispersed individual CNT's.
Thanks everyone for their very helpful reply. Dr. Dickerson I am not having access to iop journals and that sciencedirect paper, so if you could upload them, that would be a great help.
There are several ways, depending of the quality you are looking for. Langmuir-Blodgett is one of the possibilities, high quality but dificult, also it permits self-assembly. Other possibilities are spincoating (easy but low quality), plasma CVD using a polimerization process in gas phase (restricted to few materials like silicon and related), advantatges of modulated PECVD are its high purity and monodispersion of size . Magnetron sputtering of an ultrathin layer combined with a thermal treatment to granulate nanoparticles (this is appropiated for some kind of metallic nanoparticles).
A new method for building photonic-crystal opal films by stacking monodisperse spherical silica particles into a regular structure in a surfactant medium
Cant we deposit copper nanoparticles by means of inkjet printers after making a dispersion of nanoparticles ? I was going through some literature which have shown work on this area. Kindly give your opinion about this.
Here is yet another approach which might be useful to you, check
http://spie.org/x103771.xml
and references within.The results are similar to what Sergey Komogortsev describes, however, the fabrication technique is different: we are using a doctor blade technique and we are quite happy with it.
The best technique for you pretty much depends on what thickness you are interested in, if the particles should be regularly arranged and how the surface of your substrate looks like in terms of roughness, wettability etc..
Another posibility (and more ease way) is using a Layer-by-Layer deposition but, for that, you need the Zeta potencial of the nanoparticles because the superficial charge of the nanoparticles stabilizers...
Spray coatings technique is another easy option (you can use via Air brush Spray, atomizer, Nebulizer or any other available option). As Enric Bertran mentioned, there are plenty of methods with their cons and pros: Spray coatings is very handy and pretty good yielding uniform coatings especially for thick films (few microns). Still you can optimize certain parameters including Nanoparticle solution concentration, solvent type (ethanol, methanol evaporates quickly than de-ioinzed water), source (air brush) to substrate distance, spray time etc.
Electrostatic spray could be a better choice if you can handle its optimized parameter depending upon your solution (if in solution phase)..like density , viscosity of your sample .....
To control deposition first you have to fix amount of your material, vacuum chamber (thermal evaporation or supporting techniques) and finally fix the deposition time and area of your substrate