Engineering Foam Skeletons with Multilayered Graphene Oxide Coatings for Enhanced Energy Dissipation

This work shows how to improve the energy dissipation of open-cell polyurethane (PU) foams by creating multilayered graphene oxide (GO) nano-architectures onto the struts via a modified dip-coating process. Pristine PU foams are alternately dip-coated with GO coatings and water-based polyurethane dispersions (PUD) for a given number of times. The GO coating morphologies are carefully adjusted and the inner energy dissipation mechanisms reach the optimized interfacial frictions of GO-PU and GO-GO. Along with the synergistic effect of the multiple interpenetrating structure of GO/PU coating phases, these engineered composite foams with extremely low GO content (~0.12 wt%) afford a significant increase of quasi-static energy dissipation (52%) and dynamic damping (76%) when compared with counterpart foams coated with the same number of pure PUD layers. The specific Young’s modulus and strength of the designed foams also show remarkable enhancements of 310% and 490% respectively compared with those of pristine PU foams.