Preparation Of Reactive Carbon Nanotubes And Its Effect On The Mechanical Properties Of Epoxy Resin

Epoxy resins are widely used thermosetting matrices for advanced composites due to their good specific strength and chemical resistance, but their thermal properties and toughness still need to be improved. In recent years, the carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were considered to be ideal reinforcements in composites due to their unique mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. However, although there are many studies on preparation and properties of CNTs composites, the dispersion and interface of the CNTs in matrix still need to be improved. Therefore, the improvement of dispersion and interface adhesion of CNTs in epoxy resin is the key factor to prepare CNTs/epoxy composites with good performance.In this paper, a kind of reactive multi-walled carbon nanotubes with different weight proportions of BGE was prepared after oxidization, acyl-chlorination and amino-functionalization, and then the MWNTs/epoxy composites were made.In this research, MWNTs were characterized through FTIR, XPS, TEM; the mechanical and thermal properties of the composites were tested and the optimal ratio of diluents to reactive MWNTs is fixed. It is found that these kind of reactive carbon nanotubes (r-CNTs) disperse well in epoxy resins and can form strong covalent bonds with epoxy during curing reactions, and enhance the properties effectively. When mixing with 0.5wt% reactive carbon nanobubes, the tensile strength, flexural strength and impact strength of the epoxy is increased by 37.5%,40.0% and 207.7%, respectably, moreover, the r-MWNTs/epoxy nano-matrix exhibit good wettabilty to T-700 carbon fibers. The research on the cure behavior of r-CNTs/epoxy indicates that the r-CNTs/epoxy nano-matrix has higher reactivity.