Abstract
To take full advantages of the structural uniqueness and exceptional properties of graphene as reinforcement in composites, harvesting well-dispersed graphene is essential. On the other hand, it is challenging to achieve simultaneously high stiffness, strength and toughness in engineered materials because of the trade-off relations between these properties. Here we demonstrate that the graphene reinforcing potential can be significantly enhanced through the excellent dispersion of graphene sheets in the matrix material and the strong graphene-matrix bonding by the coupled hydrogen passivation and ultrasonication technique. The fabricated graphene/epoxy composites exhibit simultaneously remarkable increase in elastic modulus, fracture strength and fracture energy. We found that the inlet hydrogen atoms in the hydrogen passivation serve as a source of the second atoms to terminate the C dangling bonds and form more stable C-H bonds, separating graphene flakes and promoting the binding with the matrix material.
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Introduction
Exceptional physical properties, high aspect ratio and low density of graphene have made it an ideal candidate for develo** the next generation of polymer compositesSupplementary materials. The microtribometer has the load and displacement sensors that allow us to perform tensile and bending on the graphene/epoxy composite samples. The control sample was also tested for comparison. For each composite, five beam samples with the dimension of 20 × 2.5 × 2.0 mm (length × width × height) were tested. The elastic modulus of the tested composites was calculated from the initial linear portion of the three-point bending loading-displacementcurve. The loading force at failure in bending test was used to calculate the fracture strength of the beam.
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Acknowledgements
Financial support for this study was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (CMMI-1129979 and CMMI-0968843). The authors thank the staff members at the University of South Carolina EM Center for SEM technical support and Yating Mao for providing Mica substrate.
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Y.Y. and X. L. designed the project. Y.Y. performed the experiments. Y.Y., W.R. and X.H. carried out the Raman spectroscopy experiments and analyzed the Raman results. Y.Y. and X.L. wrote this paper.
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Yang, Y., Rigdon, W., Huang, X. et al. Enhancing graphene reinforcing potential in composites by hydrogen passivation induced dispersion. Sci Rep 3, 2086 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep02086
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep02086
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