Micromechanical characterization of single-walled carbon nanotube reinforced ethylidene norbornene nanocomposites for self-healing applications

We report on the fabrication of self healing nanocomposite materials, consisting of single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) reinforced 5-Ethylidene-2-norbornene (5E2N) healing agent -reacted with Ruthenium Grubbs catalyst- by means of ultrasonication, followed by a three-roll mixing mill process. The kinetics of the 5E2N ring opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) was studied as a function of the reaction temperature and the SWCNT loads. Our results demonstrated that the ROMP reaction still effective in a large temperature domain (-15 to 45 ºC), occurring at very short time scales (less than one minute at 40 ºC). On the other hand, the micro-indentation analysis performed on the SWCNT/5E2N nanocomposite materials after its ROMP polymerization were shown a clear increase in both the hardness and the Young modulus -up to nine times higher than that of the virgin polymer- when SWCNT loads range only from 0.1 to 2 wt. %. This approach demonstrated here opens new prospects for using carbon nanotube and healing agent nanocomposite materials for self-repair functionality, especially in space environment.