Effect of carbon nanotubes on the curing and thermomechanical behavior of epoxy/carbon nanotubes composites

The processing of carbon nanotube based nanocomposites is one of the fastest growing areas in materials research due to the potential of significantly changing material properties even at low carbon nanotube concentrations. The aim of our work is to study the curing and thermomechanical behavior of carbon nanotube/epoxy nanocomposites that are critical from an application standpoint. Multiwall carbon nanotubes–epoxy composites are prepared by solvent evaporation based on a commercially available epoxy system and functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes. Three weight ratio configurations are considered (0.1, 0.5, and 1.0 wt%) and compared to both the neat epoxy to investigate the nano‐enrichment effect. We focus here on the modification of the curing behavior of the epoxy polymer in the presence of carbon nanotubes. It has been observed that introducing the multiwall carbon nanotubes delays the polymerization process as revealed by the modification of the activation energy obtained by differential scanning calorimetry. The viscoelastic response of the nanocomposites was studied from the measurements of storage modulus and the loss factor using dynamic mechanical analysis to evaluate the effect of the interface in each matrix/carbon nanotube system with changing matrix mobility. These measurements provide indications about the increase in the storage modulus of the composites, shift in the glass transition temperature due to the restriction of polymer chain movement by carbon nanotubes. POLYM. COMPOS., 35:441–449, 2014. © 2013 Society of Plastics Engineers