Selection of Immiscible Polymer Blends Filled with Carbon Nanotubes for Heating Applications

Abstract

In many application fields, such as medicine or sports, heating textiles use electrically conductive multifilaments. This multifilament can be developed from conductive polymer composites (CPC), which are blends of an insulating polymer filled with electrically conductive particles. However, this multifilament must have filler content above the percolation threshold, which leads to an increase of the viscosity and problems during the melt spinning process. Immiscible blends between two polymers (one being a CPC) can be used to allow the reduction of the global filler content if each polymer is co-continuous with a selective localization of the fillers in only one polymer. In this study, three immiscible blends were developed between polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, or polyamide 6 and a filled polycaprolactone with carbon nanotubes. The morphology of each blend at different ratios was studied using models of co-continuity and prediction of fillers localization according to viscosity, interfacial energy, elastic modulus, and loss factor of each polymer. This theoretical approach was compared to experimental values to find out differences between methods. The electrical properties (electrical conductivity and Joule effect) were also studied. The co-continuity, the selective localization in the polycaprolactone, and the Joule effect were only exhibited by the polypropylene/filled polycaprolactone 50/50 wt.%.