Collaborative Research: Mechanical and Electrical Response of Novel Polymer Grafted CNT Reinforced Copolymers under Quasi-static and Dynamic Loading

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The goal of this collaborative project is to develop smart polymeric materials that can report critical material deformation in the 10 to 500 nm range through an embedded electrically conductive network. Nano-structured building blocks will be synthesized to generate such network. The building block has a brush-like structure with electrically conducting polymers as the bristles, and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as the backbone of the brush. When the nano-brushes are blended into the host matrix, the conducting polymers will be entangled with the host polymers. The brush structure is designed to enhance the signal in response to nano deformations. The electrical signals obtained from the conductive network will be far richer in details than traditional plots of mechanical stress-strain behavior. The details will be used to verify or refute the mechanisms previously proposed to explain the mechanical stress-strain curves under various types of quasi-static and dynamic loading conditions. The outcome of this project can be used as smart sensors that include structural health monitoring in bridges, hydropower plants, aircrafts, vehicle crumple zones and smart body-armor responsive systems. This collaborative research project will greatly benefit both graduate & undergraduate students by interacting with faculty and students in science and engineering from two different universities. The students will be asked to visit local high-schools for demonstrating simple experiments on proposed conductive systems under various loads. The results from this project study will also be posted regularly on web pages of principal investigators for speedy dissemination of information.