Investigating the Electrical Properties of Epoxy Resin Containing MWCNT-PANI with a Core-Shell Morphology: Synthesis and Characterization

The aim of this study was to synthesize doped polyaniline and carboxylate multi-walled carbon nanotubes-polyaniline nanocomposites with a core-shell morphology, in HCl (PANI/HCl and MWCNT-PANI/HCl, respectively) and camphorsulfonic acid (PANI/CSA and MWCNT-PANI/CSA, respectively) media and to investigate the effects of these media on electrical properties. The synthesized samples were characterized by FTIR, XRD and TGA. They were further confirmed through SEM and TEM indicating that MWCNTs have been uniformly coated with PANI. Microwave absorption measurement at X-band frequencies (8.2-12.4 GHz) revealed that as the frequency increased, so did the electrical conductivity of the synthesized core-shell nanocomposites. A series of MWCNT-PANI (2, 5 and 10 phr) were also added to epoxy resin. It was found that by increasing the frequency, the electrical permittivity of all samples remains almost constant. The EPs containing 5 and 10 phr of both nanocomposites with core-shell morphology had the lowest and highest electrical permittivity respectively, with the samples also showing low loss.