Chemically grafting carbon nanotubes onto carbon fibers by poly(acryloyl chloride) for enhancing interfacial strength in carbon fiber/unsaturated polyester composites

We propose a novel method to uniformly graft high density carbon nanotubes (CNTs) onto carbon fiber (CF) using poly (acryloyl chloride) (PACl) as coupling agents. Compared to micromolecule couping agent previously reported in literature 2,3], PACl can supply much more active groups, which is beneficial for grafting high density CNTs onto CF surface. Moreover, in order to further increase the grafting density of CNTs, the solvothermal strategy was used for improving the reactive activity between CF and CNTs. After CNTs grafting treatment, there are still substantial amounts of reactive groups which can further react with various types of molecules to meet different requirements. In order to create chemical bonding between CF and unsaturated polyester (UP), CF-CNT was further grafted with undecylenic alcohol (UA) to get CF-CNT-UA hierarchical reinforcement. The interfacial adhesion of the resulting composites showed a dramatic improvement.