Initial investigation of entropy of mixing in polymer carbon nanotube composite

Many attempts have been made to fabricate polymer carbon nanotube composites. Previous studies are focused on the methods of improving specific performance of the composites, by increasing the dispersion quality and stability. There are still no practical methods to characterize the dispersion of a nano-material in a polymer. Entropy is a concept used as a measure of disorder or chaos originally come from thermodynamic. The most popular utilization of entropy concept is thermodynamic entropy and information entropy. Furthermore, entropy is also widely used in social science, economics, and life science. The concept of entropy is used in plastic and polymer research to quantitative study the quality of mixture. Carbon nanotube differs from the powder materials in conventional industrial, because of the 1-D structure and high aspect ratio. As a result, the geometry of the CNTs must be counted in to calculate the entropy to quantitatively assess the degree of mixing of CNT filled polymer nano-composites. In this article, a theoretical description of entropy of mixing is given. A Monte Carlo model is created as an initial simulation algorithm to quantitatively study the entropy of mixing.