Tenon Effects at Drilled Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes to Strongly Enhance Mechanical and Luminescent Properties of Epoxy Resin Composites

The effectiveness of mechanical enhancement of carbon nanotubes-polymer matrices, particularly, epoxy resin (EP), depends strongly on the interface interaction between constituents. Providing rough surface and chemical activity of CNTs is the effective way to reach that. To explore both approaches, in this study, unzipped CNTs (uCNTs) and drilled CNTs (dCNTs)were prepared by Hummers methods and chemical etching. The structure of uCNTs and dCNTs were characterized by FT-IR, TG and XPS. The Eu3+ complexes were anchored to CNTs, uCNTs, and dCNTs via strong interaction to form a stable “tenon” structure. That materials were found useful to fabricate the composite with EP. Our study reveals that the ultimate tensile and flexural strengths of Eu-dCNTs/EP increases by 161% and 226%, indicating that Eu-dCNTs improves significantly the mechanical properties of EP. The drilling treatment and the “tenon” structure of the Eu-dCNTs hybrid play a key role in improving the mechanical properties of EP. Fracture morphology and the strengthening mechanism were discussed. Our study shows an effectiveness of using dCNTs and uCNTs to fabricate luminescent polymer composites with enhanced properties.