MWNT reinforced polyurethane foam: Processing, characterization and modelling of mechanical properties

The mechanical properties of a foam material changes when the foam is reinforced with nanoparticles. In this paper it is investigated how the addition of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) influences the effective properties of polyurethane foam. Both pure and nano-reinforced foams containing different amounts of MWNT are produced and both pristine and functionalized MWNT are used as reinforcement. The MWNT are dispersed in the polyol using high-shear mixing with various mixing times to examine how that influences the properties of the produced foams. SEM is used to characterize the microstructure of the produced foams and these examinations reveals that the foam changes from a completely closed cell material for the pure PU foam to a partly open celled foam when adding MWNT. Compressive tests are performed in order to determine the strength and stiffness of the produced foams and the increase in these properties are very dependent on both the wt.% of MWNT and the mixing time used to disperse them in the polyol. Furthermore, the effective properties of the reinforced foams are determined using the Mori–Tanaka (MT) method and generally the correlation between the experimentally and numerically determined properties improves when the mixing time used increases for a constant wt.% of MWNT.