Carbon nanotube superplastic with long-awaited performance

Abstract Plastics are widely used in daily life. They are light, easy to fabricate into different shapes, but usually not good conductors for heat and electricity, which had limited their application of many fields. One way to alter the properties of a plastic involves the incorporation of an additive phase. For example, introducing carbon nanotube (CNT) can improve the thermal and electric conductivity of a polymer. However, conventional methods usually need harsh pretreatments, which deteriorates the intrinsic high conductance of the materials. As a result, the properties of these obtained CNT-polymer composites are usually way less than expectation.