Mechanical property and structure of covalent functionalised graphene/epoxy nanocomposites

Minoo Naebe; Jing Wang; Abbas Amini; Hamid Khayyam; Nishar Hameed; Lu Hua Li; Ying Chen; Bronwyn Fox

doi:10.1038/srep04375

Mechanical property and structure of covalent functionalised graphene/epoxy nanocomposites

Sci Rep. 2014 Mar 14:4:4375. doi: 10.1038/srep04375.

Authors

Minoo Naebe¹, Jing Wang², Abbas Amini³, Hamid Khayyam¹, Nishar Hameed¹, Lu Hua Li², Ying Chen², Bronwyn Fox¹

Affiliations

¹ 1] Institute for Frontier Materials, Deakin University, Victoria 3216, Australia [2] Carbon Nexus, Deakin University, Victoria 3216, Australia.
² Institute for Frontier Materials, Deakin University, Victoria 3216, Australia.
³ School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Western Sydney, Kingswood, NSW, 2751.

Abstract

Thermally reduced graphene nanoplatelets were covalently functionalised via Bingel reaction to improve their dispersion and interfacial bonding with an epoxy resin. Functionalised graphene were characterized by microscopic, thermal and spectroscopic techniques. Thermal analysis of functionalised graphene revealed a significantly higher thermal stability compared to graphene oxide. Inclusion of only 0.1 wt% of functionalised graphene in an epoxy resin showed 22% increase in flexural strength and 18% improvement in storage modulus. The improved mechanical properties of nanocomposites is due to the uniform dispersion of functionalised graphene and strong interfacial bonding between modified graphene and epoxy resin as confirmed by microscopy observations.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't