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Significant Improvement of Mechanical Properties Observed in Highly Aligned Carbon-Nanotube-Reinforced Nanofibers

2009; American Chemical Society; Volume: 113; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1021/jp8077198

1932-7455

Jianying Ji, Gang Sui, Yunhua Yu, Yanxin Liu, Yuanhua Lin, Zhongjie Du, Seung‐Kon Ryu, Xiaoping Yang,

Fiber-reinforced polymer composites

Continuous macroscopic aligned polyacrylonitrile (PAN) composite nanofiber sheets embedded with highly aligned PAN-grafted multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) have been prepared by electrospinning followed by hot-stretching. Homogeneous and highly aligned MWCNTs in the polymer matrix were obtained by hot-stretching of the electrospun fibers, which led to a significant enhancement in the mechanical performance of the resulting composite nanofiber sheets. After hot-stretching, the tensile strength and modulus of an electrospun PAN nanofiber sheet (containing 2 wt % grafted MWCNTs) increased by 320.7% and 204.5%, respectively, compared with the values for the pristine PAN terpolymer. In addition we show, for the first time, that a Raman mapping method can be successfully employed to investigate the distribution and alignment of MWCNTs in nanofiber sheets.