Mineo Hiramatsu

By Mineo Hiramatsu and Masaru Hori

Part of the book: Carbon Nanotubes

By Mineo Hiramatsu, Hiroki Kondo and Masaru Hori

Part of the book: New Progress on Graphene Research

By Mineo Hiramatsu, Hiroki Kondo and Masaru Hori

Self-organized graphite sheet nanostructures composed of graphene have been studied intensively. Carbon nanowalls and related sheet nanostructures are layered graphenes with open boundaries. The sheets form a self-supported network of wall structures with thicknesses in the range from a few nanometers to a few tens of nanometers, and with a high aspect ratio. The large surface area and sharp edges of carbon nanowalls could prove useful for a number of different applications. Fabrication techniques of carbon nanowalls and possible applications using carbon nanowalls as nanoplatform in the area of electrochemistry and tissue engineering have been described. Radical injection technique was successfully applied to fabricate straight and large-size monolithic carbon nanosheet. The structure of carbon nanowalls was controlled by changing the total pressure and input power. In addition, the structure of carbon nanowalls was modified by O2 plasma etching and H2O2 treatment. Using carbon nanowalls as platform would be the most promising and important application. Carbon nanowalls were used as electrode to detect several biomolecules. In addition, carbon nanowalls were oxidized by the surface treatment using atmospheric pressure plasma, and proteins such as bovine serum albumin were immobilized on these surface. Moreover, carbon nanowalls were used as scaffold for cell culturing. The dependence of the cell culturing rates and morphological changes of HeLa cells on carbon nanowall scaffolds with different densities and wettability were systematically investigated. Nanoplatform based on vertical nanographene offers great promise for providing a new class of nanostructured electrodes for electrochemical sensing, biosensing and energy conversion applications.

Part of the book: Graphene