Azadeh Soroudi

Melt Spinning of Carbon Nanotube Modified Polypropylene for Electrically Conducting Nanocomposite Fibres

Blends of polypropylene with multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNT) have been prepared and melt spun to fibre filaments. The resulted filaments have been characterised regarding conductivity, thermal properties, and morphology. DSC suggests that carbon nanotubes act as nucleating sites in polypropylene and the TGA shows a high increase in thermal stability. Conductivity around 0.001 S/cm are achieved for both as-spun fibre and drawn fibre. A higher load of CNT up to 15 wt % increases the conductivity to 2.8 S/cm in as-spun fibre, but due to a high fibre diameter variation during spinning resulting in fibre breakage, melt spinning is very difficult. This is due to a non-uniform stress distribution during the drawing steps which can be a result of a non-homogeneous PP-CNT blend and the spinning machine process limitations. Differences in conductivities for extruded rods, as-spun fibre and drawn fibre which are made from the same blends, suggests that the crystallinity can affect the conductivity of the PP/CNT fibre.