Decorating surface charge of graphite nanoplate using an electrostatic coupling agent for 3‐dimensional polymer nanocomposite

Abstract

Here, we report a facile approach to electrostatically couple the surface charges of graphite nanoplate (GNP) fillers and poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) polymer particles using ethylene maleic anhydride (EMA) copolymer as an electrostatic coupling agent. Our strategy involved switching the intrinsic repulsive electrostatic interactions between the directly exfoliated GNPs fillers and the PMMA particles to attractive electrostatic surface interactions for preparing core(PMMA)‐shell (GNP) precursor in order to optimizing 3‐dimensionally dispersed polymer nanocomposite. As a result, the electrical conductivity of the composites dramatically increased by a factor of 16.7 in the EMA‐coupled GNP/PMMA composites compared with that of the EMA‐free GNP/PMMA composites. In addition, the percolation threshold was also notably reduced from 0.32 to 0.159 vol% after electrostatic coupling of the GNPs fillers and PMMA particles. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2020, 137, 48390.

Highly Water-Dispersible Graphene Nanosheets From Electrochemical Exfoliation of Graphite

“…Graphene, atomically thin carbon layers exfoliated from graphite in which multiple layers of sp 2 -bonded carbon atoms are arranged in a hexagonal lattice, has been standing at the center of materials due to its great potential applications in next-generation electronic devices ( Kwon et al, 2020 ; Alonso et al, 2018 ), energy conversion and storage devices ( Jang et al, 2021 ; Tanguy et al, 2020 ), catalysis ( Hwang et al, 2019 ; Lu et al, 2016 ), and other functional composites ( Ryu et al, 2020 ; Wu et al, 2017 ) owing to its unique electrical, mechanical, optical, and chemical properties ( Kwon et al, 2017 ; Dong et al, 2017 ; Kim et al, 2019 ). While the preparation methods of graphene such as Scotch Tape exfoliation ( Novoselov et al, 2004 ), epitaxial growth ( Yang et al, 2013 ), and chemical vapor deposition using gaseous precursors ( Plutnar et al, 2018 ) could yield high-quality graphene, its commercialization has been hindered owing to the lack of cost-effective industrial-scale production methods.…”