Effect of CNT on Liquid Crystal Elastomer

Dispersion of Carbon Nanotube (CNT) into Liquid Crystal Elastomers (LCE) provides simple and effective means of controlling physical properties at macroscopic scale. In this paper, we doped LCE with small amount of carbon nanotube and characterizations were performed by various techniques like Polarizing Microscopy Study (PMS), Fabry Perot Scattering Studies (FPSS), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy, Data Thermal Analysis (DTA) and Mechanical Study. The experimental results reveal that optical, thermal and mechanical properties are function of doped CNT material, which reflected strong agglomeration and rearrangement of nanotubes in LCE. Therefore, a small amount of CNT enhances existing properties which can be optimized for various applications.