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Micromechanical characterization of single-walled carbon nanotube reinforced ethylidene norbornene nanocomposites for self-healing applications

2012; IOP Publishing; Volume: 21; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1088/0964-1726/21/10/105028

1361-665X

Brahim Aïssa, E. Haddad, Wes Jamroz, Salim Hassani, Rouhollah D. Farahani, P.G. Merle, Daniel Therriault,

Electrohydrodynamics and Fluid Dynamics

We report on the fabrication of self healing nanocomposite materials, consisting of single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) reinforced 5-Ethylidene-2-norbornene (5E2N) healing agent -reacted with Ruthenium Grubbs catalyst-by means of ultrasonication, followed by a three-roll mixing mill process.The kinetics of the 5E2N ring opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) was studied as a function of the reaction temperature and the SWCNT loads.Our results demonstrated that the ROMP reaction still effective in a large temperature domain (-15 to 45 ºC), occurring at very short time scales (less than one minute at 40 ºC).On the other hand, the micro-indentation analysis performed on the SWCNT/5E2N nanocomposite materials after its ROMP polymerization were shown a clear increase in both the hardness and the Young modulus -up to nine times higher than that of the virgin polymer-when SWCNT loads range only from 0.1 to 2 wt.%.This approach demonstrated here opens new prospects for using carbon nanotube and healing agent nanocomposite materials for self-repair functionality, especially in space environment.