High elasticity and conductivity of elastomer composites with arrayed carbon nanotubes as nanosprings

Abstract Previous studies using molecular simulation indicated that carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can act as nanosprings to adjust the viscoelasticity of elastomer composites. In this study, we prepared elastomer composites with both high elasticity and conductivity for the first time using carbon nanotubes array (CNTA) as nanosprings. A special CNTA bundle prepared by electrostatic self-assembly was directly blended with the polymethylvinylsiloxane (PMVS) matrix. The results indicated that these CNTAs were well dissociated into many single CNTs with almost no change in length in the PMVS matrix with low viscosity during mechanical shearing, and exhibited a nanospring effect. The CNTA composites exhibited not only higher conductivity and electromagnetic shielding effectiveness but also higher elasticity than the commonly used conductive carbon black composites at the same filler content. This study indicated that high performance conductive elastomer composites can be obtained by using special CNTAs as nanosprings.