Carbon Nanoparticles on Carbon Fabric for Flexible and High-Performance Field Emitters

Carbon nanoparticles (CNPs) are grown on flexible carbon fabric via a simple and low-cost flame synthesis process. The entire struture of the carbon fabric substrate retains its high flexibility after the growth of CNPs and can even be rolled-up and twisted to a large degree without affecting the electric characteristics. No appreciable changes in the conductance can be observed under different bending curvatures after hundreds of bending cycles. The thermal conductivity of the carbon fabric with CNPs is about 2.34 W m(-1) K-1, about one order of magnitude higher than that of most polymer substrates. The field emitter fabricated using the structure has a low threshold electric field of around 2.8 V mu m(-1), and a high field emission current density of 108 mA cm(-2), which is about two to four orders of magnitude higher than that of most polymer substrate-based flexible CNT field emitters. These results indicate that CNPs on carbon fabric have potential applications in flexible electronics devices and displays.