Excellent multifunctional behaviors of epoxy nanocomposites reinforced with graphene aerogel

Abstract

In this study, graphene aerogel (GA) was utilized to improve the multifunctionality of epoxy resin, which is highly necessary in its applications in integrated circuits and semiconductors. A scalable method with high capability for production of large size GA with desirable quality was proposed for GA synthesis. The synthesized GA was utilized to produce epoxy nanocomposite by epoxy resin infiltration in its macro-pores. Flexural modulus of the GA/epoxy nanocomposite was experimentally investigated and the results showed 30% increase with respect to the pure epoxy. The electrical conductivity of the nanocomposite reached to remarkable amount of 0.7 S/m, which is 13 orders of magnitudes more than the electrical conductivity of the neat epoxy. Moreover, the measured thermal conductivity for pure epoxy and GA/epoxy nanocomposites were 0.23 and 0.40 W/mK, respectively. The percentage of thermal conductivity enhancement per filler content is more than 101, which is in the top range of the reached values by various filler types in polymer nanocomposites. The proposed method could simultaneously increase the mechanical, electrical and thermal properties of epoxy polymer, and could be greatly beneficial for applications that need epoxy polymer with high multifunctionality.