Effects of block copolymer dispersant and nanotube length on reinforcement of carbon/epoxy composites

Mechanical behaviour of advanced composite laminates embedded with carbon nanotubes: review

“…With a precise control over time, temperature and pressure, laminates of high quality are produced routinely. Naturally, it has been used to fabricate nano-laminates as in [1,[10][11][12]15]. VARTM has been equally popular due to its possibility of using dry fabrics and liquid resins as starting materials, low tooling requirement and low cost [3,4,6,8,9,13,16,17].…”

“…SWNTs are usually smaller in diameter and shorter in length than MWNTs with better mechanical properties. Three major production methods for CNTs are electric arch discharge [6], laser ablation of metal-doped carbon rods and CVD [1][2][3]5,8,10,12,15]. While the first two methods produce high quality CNTs in general, they are neither able to produce only SWNTs nor able to control their lengths.…”

“…There is a dearth of information on in-plane compression results of nano-laminates [12,15] due probably to the wellknown complexity involved in jig requirement and assembly, if using ASTM D3410 standard [24], as well as test execution. Both groups of the authors [12,15] used their own testing methods and neither provided details of compression load introduction techniques.…”

“…An advantage of the fabric doping techniques is that not all fabric layers need to be doped so that they could be used cost-effectively for wherever enhancement of mechanical performance is desired. Alternatively, doped resin could be poured onto dry fabric layers individually and then all individual layers were stacked up to be cured using an autoclave [10][11][12]15]. The advantage of this process was that it also allowed additional CNTs to be either sprinkled or inserted in the form of film at selected through-the-thickness location.…”

“…As a result, research efforts worldwide, especially from newcomers of entering this emerging field could be more focused on those issues and thereby chanelled into making greater progress rather than reinventing the wheel. This paper intends to provide a state-of-the-art review of the published literature in this field [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] with exclusive attention being paid to experimental work. It aims ultimately at the establishment of a understanding of how and via what deformation mechanisms purposely processed and controlled CNTs influence the mechanical performance of the laminate host.…”