Improving mechanical properties of multi-walled carbon nanotube/epoxy composites through a simple stretch-drawing method

Abstract

Horizontally aligned multi-walled carbon nanotube (CNT) sheets were produced from vertically aligned CNT arrays using drawing and winding techniques. Composites based on epoxy resin and an aligned 100-ply CNT sheet have been developed using hot-melt prepreg processing. However, wavy and poor-packed CNTs in the sheets have limited reinforcement efficiency of the CNTs in the composites. In this study, a new simple stretch-drawing method was used to modify the structures of the aligned CNT sheets for improving the composite properties. The stretch-drawing of the CNT sheets enhanced the composite properties considerably. The improved properties of the composites originated from straightening of the wavy CNTs and increasing the CNT dense packing in the composites. With a 3% stretch ratio, the aligned CNT/epoxy composites achieved their best mechanical properties in this study. The 3% stretched composites exhibit increased tensile strength by 113% and enhanced elastic modulus by 34% compared to non-stretched ones. Results show that the simple stretch-drawing is effective to produce highly aligned CNT sheets for the development of high-performance CNT composites. Compared to our previous stretching method, the stretch-drawing method in this study is more effective in improving the mechanical properties of aligned CNT/epoxy composites.