NER: Light-Weight Minimally-Intrusive Damping Films Featuring Carbon Nanotubes

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This project investigates the potential for augmenting damping incomposite structures by taking advantage of the energy dissipation betweendensely packed, highly interconnected networks of multi-walled carbonnanotubes (nano-films) . The novel, nano-engineered damping filmsdeveloped in this project are expected to offer several advantages: 1) Nano-films show no degradation in structure/properties upto 600 deg C and are expected to offer superior performance and reliability for hightemperature applications. 2) Nano-films do not exhibit resin penetrationwhen co-cured within composite structures and could potentially beseamlessly integrated into heterogeneous systems. 3) Nano-films offermulti-functionality in terms of enhanced stiffness in addition to dampingaugmentation. The specific stiffness of nano-films are expected to be anorder of magnitude greater than commercially available viscoelasticpolymer films. This research project is directed towards further exploringand developing these concepts so as to enable the efficient synthesis ofthese novel multifunctional materials into multi-scale structural systems.The project involves strong interdisciplinary collaboration betweenmaterial science (patterning and assembly of nanostructures) andmechanical engineering (damping and stiffness increase in composites). The project will contribute to the training of 1 Ph.D student and severalundergraduate students (under the Undergraduate Research Projects - URPProgram) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.