New Equipment and Approaches for Fabrication of Uniformly-Dispersed Nanoclay Cluster/Epoxy Composites

Abstract

The development of nanocomposites for different engineering applications has been going through a progressive period since the last decade. The miniaturization of devices and systems such as micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMs) and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMs), has brought up the need of ultra-strong structural materials and composites. Research in nanoclay related polymer composites has been a hot topic in the past few years. It is believed that the use of this material to form composites is able to enhance the mechanical, thermal and electrical properties of Polyurethane (PU), Polyester (PE) and Epoxy. However, these composites have only achieved a small strength increment that is below expected potential. The difficulties are on how to produce uniformly-dispersed nanoclay/polymer composites and avoid clustering effect. In this project, a new experiment setup is proposed to mix nanoclay and epoxy together to form uniformly-dispersed nano-sized nanoclay cluster/ epoxy composites. In the experiment, it was found that the micro-hardness of the composites (with 5 wt.% of nanoclay) increased up to 50% under a controlled spinning, curing time and temperature environment.