Alignment of Rods and Flakes using Electric Field 

¹School of Engineering and Innovation, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes WA76AA, UK

Adv. Mater. Lett., 2019, 10 (12), pp 899-902

DOI: 10.5185/amlett.2019.0020

Publication Date (Web): May 20, 2019

Copyright © IAAM-VBRI Press

E-mail: rongshan.qin@open.ac.uk

Abstract

Electrically neutral anisotropic objects can be aligned by the applied electric field. The required processing conditions include to submerge the objects in a matrix with higher electrical conductivity than that of the objects and to apply electric field to the suspension. The objects may be in rod, disk, flakes or other anisotropic shapes. Carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, micro coils, DNA and many bacteria can be approximated as rod-like shape, and graphene can be considered as a shape of flake. A fundamental investigation to this phenomenon has been carried out in the present work. Numerical calculation based on thermodynamics shows a confirmative trend to use electric field to align those materials. The driving force in the alignment processing is an equivalent configuration force dependent on the discrepancy between the electrical properties of the anisotropic particles and matrix. © VBRI Press.

Keywords

Anisotropic particles, alignment, electropulse