Polymer/carbon nanotube composites: A comprehensive review on fabrication techniques and their consequences

Polymers have attracted significant attention in recent years due to their light weight, low cost, favorable strength-to-weight ratio, and ease of fabrication. Their mechanical and thermal properties have been significantly tailored by reinforcing carbon-based and metal nanofiller materials that possess excellent mechanical and thermal properties. In addition, excellent morphological properties and good aspect ratio of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), graphene, graphene nanoplatelets (GNP), graphene oxide (GO), etc., make them ideal candidates for reinforcement purposes. CNTs/GO have been widely used for the synthesis of polymeric-based composite materials. Moreover, high modulus, better strength, and thermal stability at extremely high temperatures of CNTs/GO motivated various researchers and scientists to make them useful for engineering applications. Their composites with polymer-based composite materials have opened several avenues of application for the automobile, aircraft, textile industries, and biomedical applications. However, during the synthesis of composites, the uniform dispersion into the polymer matrix is a challenge to achieve. Therefore, numerous techniques have been developed by researchers to disperse CNTs/GO throughout the polymer matrix. The selection of the fabrication technique is critically important as the overall performance of the final and developed product is highly dependent on the quality/degree of dispersion, i.e., to what extent carbon particles are dispersed within the matrix. In this review, various fabrication methods for different polymeric composite materials were thoroughly reviewed, and their impact on mechanical and thermal properties were discussed. The review highlights processing methods suitable for the synthesis of polymer composites depending on their applications.