Electrical and mechanical properties of polyimide–carbon nanotubes composites fabricated by in situ polymerization

Polyimide (PI)–carbon nanotubes composites were fabricated by in situ polymerization using multi wall carbon nanotubes (MWNT) as fillers. It suggested that in situ polymerization is an ideal technique to make a perfect dispersion of carbon nanotubes into matrixes. Besides it, the pre-treatment of carbon nanotubes in solvent to make the networks untied enough and to let solvent percolated into the networks is very important for forming uniform entanglements between carbon nanotubes and polymer molecular chains. The results imply that the percolation threshold for the electric conductivity of the resultant PI–MWNT composites was ca. 0.15 vol%. The electrical conductivity has been increased by more than 11 orders of magnitude to 10−4 S/cm at the percolation threshold. The mechanical properties of the polyimide composite were not improved significantly by addition of carbon nanotubes.