Deakin University
Browse

Epoxy nanocomposites with aligned carbon nanofillers by external electric fields

Version 2 2024-06-06, 00:28
Version 1 2016-05-04, 17:01
conference contribution
posted on 2024-06-06, 00:28 authored by CH Wang, RB Ladani, SY Wu, J Zhang, AJ Kinloch, K Ghorbani, AP Mouritz
This paper presents systematic studies on aligning carbon nanofillers in epoxy by external fields, either electric fields or magnetic fields, to create nanocomposites with greatly improved mechanical and electrical properties. Carbon nanofibers (CNFs) and graphene nanoplatelets (GnPs) were observed to align along the field direction in the epoxy resin. Compared to the unmodifed epoxy and those with randomly-oriented carbon nanofillers, the nanocomposites with aligned carbon nanofillers showed significantly higher fracture toughness and electrical conductivity along the direction of the external field. Compared with randomly-oriented nanofillers, aligned GnPs and CNFs produced 40% and 27% improvement in fracture energy at 1.0 wt%, bringing the total increase in fracture energy over the neat polymer to more than 10 times. Several key toughening mechanisms were identified through fractographic analysis, which was used to develop predictive models to quantify the increases in the value of GIc as a result of 1-D and 2D carbon nanofillers. The present findings suggest that aligning carbon nanofillers presents a very promising technique to create multi-scale reinforcement with greatly increased electric conductivity and fracture toughness.

History

Pagination

1-8

Location

Copenhagen, Denmark

Start date

2015-07-19

End date

2015-07-24

Language

eng

Publication classification

E Conference publication, E2 Full written paper - non-refereed / Abstract reviewed

Copyright notice

2015, The Conference

Title of proceedings

ICCM20 2015 : Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Composite Materials

Event

Composite Materials. Conference (2015 : 20th : Copenhagen, Denmark)

Publisher

[The Conference]

Place of publication

[Copenhagen, Denmark]

Usage metrics

    Research Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC