Industrial advanced carbon nanotubes-based materials for electrostatic discharge packaging

Electrical and electronic devices are part of our daily life, their manufacture requires specific transportation systems or packaging. Electronic packagings are thus tailored to dissipate electrical charges at different levels. Traditionally plastics can become conductive by addition of conductive fillers like carbon black (CB). Alternative conductive fillers as carbon nanotubes (CNT) are interesting. They exhibit many advantages over CB such as conductivity at low level of filler, high cleanliness and high dimensional stability of CNT-based plastics. CNT-based plastics are however rarely competitive in high volume applications due to the final cost of the product. We investigate and report here economically-competitive CNT-based polystyrene compounds that are particularly suited for thermoformed sheet ESD packaging.