In recent year’s carbon nanotubes (CNTs), have attracted, and continue to attract, considerable interest in a wide variety of scientific files. Especially well-arrayed CNTs are highly desired to prepare chemical sensors, nanoprobes for scanning probe microscopy, field emitter devices. We performed the vertical alignment of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in silica, mica and glass surfaces. CNTs have been functionalized successfully using microwave method, conventional sonication method, and we found out that sonication was the better technique among all of them and was confirmed by Fourier Transform Infrared Microscopy (FTIR). For chemical reaction with chemical modified glass surface, the carboxylic acid groups were converted into acid chloride groups followed by the chemical reaction with chemically functionalized surfaces. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) results show the vertically aligned SWNTs, and the distribution of the vertically aligned SWNTs becomes denser as reaction time increase.

Alignment of the shorter nanotubes on the substrate increase with increase of reaction time (e.g. SWNTs of length 0.5 to 2µm are easy to align then the SWNTs of length 200µm). So we conclude that SWNTs are vertically aligned on chemically functionalized glass substrate by controlling chemical reactivity and tall and smaller diameter CNTs are difficult to align on substrate without support of neighboring Carbon Nanotubes.