Recent Developments of Epoxy Nanocomposites Used for Aerospace and Automotive Application

Epoxy resins are widely utilized engineering thermosetting polymers for industrial applications such as aerospace and automotive fields due to their higher mechanical, thermal, and chemical resistance. Recently, polymer nanocomposites have attracted huge attention both in academics and industry because they demonstrated the tremendous enhancement in material properties compared with a neat polymer or traditional micro and macro composites. Traditional composites generally require a high content (˃10%) of the inorganic fillers to bestow the desired mechanical properties. Higher filler content raises the density of the new product, thereby reducing the properties through fragile interfacial interaction among filler and the organic matrix. Furthermore, enhancing filler content makes processability very complicated. However, nanocomposites exhibit improved thermomechanical properties even with a small amount of nanoparticles (≤5%). The chapter provides information about the application of polymer nanocomposites (i.e., aerospace and automotive industries).