Effective separation and alignment of long entangled carbon nanotubes in epoxy

This paper investigated the microstructural change of long entangled carbon nanotubes in an epoxy matrix under continuous shear. It was found that a critical composite viscosity is required to effectively separate the entangled nanotubes and align them along the shear direction. The major nanotube separation-alignment in composite processing is reflected by the plateaus on the viscosity variation curve. An improvement of the nanotube dispersion and composite flexural modulus was obtained in aligned MWNTs-epoxy. It was also found that the addition of MWNTs decreases the crosslinking rate of the epoxy. C 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.