Single chirality of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is critical for their superb mechanical, thermal, optical and electronic properties. All known methods for producing nanotubes give mixtures of tubes with different chiralities. Physical separation of SWCNT by chirality is thus an enabling step for many potential applications and fundamental studies. The existing anion exchange resins are only partially effective for SWCNT chirality separations, with low recovery (30%) and short column life time (20 injections). Sepax Technologies, Inc. proposes to develop a new anion-exchange resin to drastically improve chirality resolution of SWCNTs. Sepax will apply its proven surface technology to in-house made uniform non-porous polystyrene/divinyl benzene beads to obtain resins with well-controlled density and distribution of charged functional groups and hydrophobic/hydrophilic characteristics, then pack into columns to achieve two technical objectives: 1) separation recovery of SWCNT samples higher than 85%; 2) resolving in a single pass (9,1) and (6,5) chirality tubes from commercial SWCNT starting materials with narrow diameter distribution. Commercial Applications: Potential commercial application of this research arises in three areas. First, Sepax will collaborate with NIST to produce a wide range of single-chirality SWCNT tubes in commercial quantities as the standard materials for worldwide research community to study and discover new properties of those materials. This is the near-term market for single chirality SWCNTs which will be predominantly in academic and big industrial research labs. A large number of research labs will generate an attractive business. Secondly, Sepax will provide commercial ion-exchange resins and LC columns for analytical and preparative separations of SWCNT to research community and industry. Third, if a particular single-chirality SWCNT material is found of great value for certain commercial applications, Sepax will provide the resin or the whole separation set-up for large-scale separation. Those two areas will open two potential businesses: 1) separation media, columns and process chromatography equipments; 2) products of single-chirality SWCNTs and the application products based on single-chirality SWCNTs.
