A numerical study to investigate the effect of carbon nanotube (CNT) entanglement on the electrical behavior of nanocomposites

Abstract

Due to their outstanding electrical and mechanical properties, carbon nanotubes (CNT) have been utilized as popular reinforcing elements for composite materials (Ajayan and Tour, 2007). However, the higher stiffness and aspect ratio (length-to-width ratio) characteristics of CNT lead to entanglement of the tubes, and often interferes with development of CNT conductive networks (Shi et al., 2004). In the present study, a micromechanical model based on Weng (2010) and Yang et al. (2014) is introduced and proposed to estimate the effect of CNT entanglement on the electrical performance of nanocomposites. A series of numerical studies for CNT-reinforced composites is carried out, and the influences of the degree of entanglement on the overall electrical properties of composites are discussed. In addition, the predictive capability of the proposed method is demonstrated via comparisons with experimental data.