Improving glass-fiber epoxy composites via interlayer toughening with polyacrylonitrile/multiwalled carbon nanotubes electrospun fibers

Abstract

The development of innovative engineered epoxy composites aiming to manufacture cost-efficient materials with reduced weight and enhanced physical properties remains as a current industrial challenge. In this work we report an original procedure for manufacturing glass-fiber epoxy reinforced nanocomposites (GFECs) by employing electrospun fiber-mats as a reinforcing phase. These fibers have been produced from polyacrylonitrile and multiwalled carbon nanotubes solutions. Optimal protocols are designed by combining Taguchi method with the morphological, structural and mechanical properties obtained by scanning electron microscopy, profilometry and tensile tests. It is demonstrated that GFECs fabricated using GF800 glass fiber show an improvement/enhancement of the mechanical properties with a fracture strain up to 500¿MPa (around 20% higher than the non-reinforced epoxy composite counterpart). It is also shown that GFECs fabricated using GF3M glass fiber exhibited a reduction of the roughness up to 56%, which corresponds with a roughness improvement from N8 to N7 following the guidelines provided by the ISO 1302. These results suggest that this type of nanocomposites would be suitable to be used in the aeronautics and automotive industries.

This work was financially supported by the “Convocatoria de Ayudas a la Realización de Proyectos de Grupos de Investigación 2020-2021” of the Universidad Católica de Murcia (UCAM), Spain, Reference: PMFI-12/21. Pavel Ryzhakov, Jordi Pons-Prats, and Christian Narváez- Muñoz would also like to acknowledge the support of the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades of Spain via the “Severo Ochoa Programme” for Centres of Excellence in R&D (reference: CEX2018-000797-S) given to the International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE). The work of Christian Narváez- Muñoz was financially supported by the “Severo Ochoa PhD Scholarship” Reference: PRE2020-096632. Pavel Ryzhakov and Jordi Pons-Prats are Serra Hunter fellows.

Peer Reviewed

Postprint (author's final draft)