Page 78 - Carbon Nanotube Fibres and Yarns

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CHAPTER 5

Interphase structures

and properties of carbon

nanotube-reinforced polymer

nanocomposite fibers

Fengying Zhang, Yaodong Liu
Key Laboratory of Carbon Materials, Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Taiyuan, China

5.1 Introduction

Natural fibers, such as cotton, flax, and silk, have been widely used for sev-
eral thousand years. The usage of natural fibers is inevitably limited by their
inherit property, quality, and available quantity. Artificial fibers or man-made
fibers were invented to overcome the limitations of these natural fibers. The
first man-made fiber, rayon, was introduced to the world in the late of 19th
century. After the development of rayon and acetate, which are regenerated
from plant cellulose, people began to explore new synthetic materials with
extraordinary performances. Nylon was the first man-made fiber synthesized
completely from petrochemicals in the late 1930s, and achieved immediate
market success. Since then, an increasing number of man-made fibers have
been invented and commercialized. Among them, Kevlar, acrylic, polyester,
polyolefin, and carbon fibers should be specially noted due to their import-
ant applications in modern society. Depending on their applications, further
development of synthetic fibers now focuses on functionalities and tensile
properties. For conventional textile applications, innovations are mostly di-
rected to comfort, flame resistance, static electrical resistance, color, dyeabil-
ity, washability, and so on; whereas, for structural applications, improvements
focus on fiber strength, modulus, elongation, and tenacity (specific strength).
In the last century, the major improvements on fiber performances have
been achieved through the following ways [1]: the inventions of new types
of polymers, resulting in fibers such as acrylic in 1950s, aromatic polyam-
ide (aramids) in 1960s, poly(p-phenylene-2,6-benzobisoxazole) (zylon), and

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