Hybrid Carbon–Silver Nanofillers for Composite Coatings with Near Metallic Electrical Conductivity

Polymeric composite materials are now very well established in all areas of engineering and are still increasingly being used to replace metallic counterparts. As an important advantage, composite materials hold the promise of multifunctionality, that is, fine tuning the material composition to synthetically achieve specific requirements. Among these requirements, the electrical conductivity is still limited to values orders of magnitude below those of typical metals. An approach to conductive fillers, which involves taking advantage of the favorable properties of both carbonaceous and metallic fillers to provide near metallic conductivity to the surface of carbon fiber reinforced polymer composites is herein presented by the authors. The synthesis of hybrid core‐shell high aspect ratio carbon–silver nanoparticles with a continuous silver coating, which allows both a low contact resistance between individual fillers and a greater connectivity owing to the wire‐like morphology of the particles is achieved by the authors. Incorporating the nanoparticles in an epoxy matrix yields a conductivity of 2.5 × 10⁵ S m⁻¹ at a loading of 6.3 vol% for a corresponding material density is of 1.9 g cm⁻³. The conductivity reached is high enough even to divert emulated lightning strike energy.