The effect of carbon nanotubes on the fracture toughness and fatigue performance of a thermosetting epoxy polymer
By T. Hsieh, A. Kinloch, A. C. Taylor, I. Kinloch. 2011
262 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Multi-walled carbon nanotubes, with a typical length of 140 μm and a diameter of 120 nm, have been used to modify an anhydride-cured epoxy polymer. The modulus, fracture energy and the fatigue performance of the modified polymers have been investigated. Microscopy showed that these long nanotubes were agglomerated, and that increasing the nanotube content increased the severity of the agglomeration. The addition of nanotubes increased the modulus of the epoxy, but the glass transition temperature was unaffected. The measured fracture energy was also increased, from 133 to 223 J/m2 with the addition of 0.5 wt% of nanotubes. The addition of the carbon nanotubes also resulted in an increase in the fatigue performance. The threshold strain-energy release-rate, Gth, increased from 24 J/m2 for the unmodified material to 73 J/m2 for the epoxy with 0.5 wt% of nanotubes. Electron microscopy of the fracture surfaces showed clear evidence of nanotube debonding and pull-out, plus void growth around the nanotubes, in both the fracture and fatigue tests. The modelling study showed that the modified Halpin–Tsai equation can fit very well with the measured values of the Young’s modulus, when the orientation and agglomeration of the nanotubes are considered. The fracture energy of the nanotube-modified epoxies was predicted, by considering the contributions of the toughening mechanisms of nanotube debonding, nanotube pull-out and plastic void growth of the epoxy. This indicated that debonding and pull-out contribute to the toughening effect, but the contribution of void growth is not significant. There was excellent agreement between the predictions and the experimental results.
Subfields: Mechanical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f995f15c24b360f4ddff144c16415ae1ca33e70c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Mechanical Engineering
In Polymers and Plastics
Citations in the corpus
- Improving the Toughness and Electrical Conductivity of Epoxy Nanocomposites by using Aligned Carbon Nanofibres (2015, methodology): “toughness [15] of CNT containing polymer composites.”
- Cracks, microcracks and fracture in polymer structures: Formation, detection, autonomic repair (2016, background): “Whereas, for carbon nano-tubes reinforcing an epoxy system, pull-out of nano-tubes and de-bonding seems to contribute to the increase in fracture energy and the contribution from plastic void growth is minimal [313].”