The interest for polymeric nanocomposites has sky-rocketed as an effect of the realization that property improvement can be achieved at substantially lower filling ratios than for conventional composites. Also, the nanometric dimensions of nanofillers bring about enhanced properties compared to its microscopic counterpart, and a significantly larger interfacial area to volume ratio. Depending on how the NPs interact with polymer matrix it is possible to obtain isotropic or anisoptropic distribution of NPs in the matrix. It has been shown that the grafting of well-defined polymers from the NP’s surface is one route to tailor the dispersability of NPs in a polymer matrix. The scope of this contribution was to investigate how the dielectric properties of a nanocomposite can be altered by the addition of a small amount of polymer-grafted NPs, grafted via surface-initiated ATRP. Different NPs and polymer grafts have been used, Fig 1. Interestingly, isotropic and anisotropic morphologies were obtained by varying the ratio between the chain length of matrix and grafts at a certain graft density. The isotropic morphologies exhibited higher resistivity (&gt;1016 Ωm), while the connected structures with short interparticle distances exhibited lower. Further, non-linear field-grading was obtained for percolated nanocomposites based on PBMA-grafted rGO in poly(ethylene-co-butyl acrylate) matrix. A sharp drop in resistivity (down to 107 Ωm) above the on-set was observed for nanocomposites with interparticle distances close to the hopping distance. This kind of molecularly engineered nanocomposite materials can be interesting for electric field grading applications in High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) cable systems, as well as in the emerging area of flexible electronics.

Polymer-grafted nanoparticles in nanocomposites for tailoring dielectric properties

254th National Meeting (2017)

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