Boosting of polyurethane elastomer nanocomposites by low doped graphene

Abstract

Graphene reinforced polyurethane elastomer (PUE) nanocomposites have been developed for decades, and much work has focused on grafting functional groups and eliminating agglomeration to reduce the number of layers for achieving enhanced performance can meet in various requires. Generally, graphene with low oxygen functional groups is considered to be unable to compatible with polymers due to their mismatched polarity and low interfacial interaction. However, our study reported a new strategy by endowing graphene a low oxygen content, via solvent-free casting synthesis method, the small size graphene (SG) with slight polarity could be well soaked in the polyether polyols and then be uniform dispersed in PUE nanocomposites at low loading level and exhibit a multi-enhanced performance. Our research indicating that no more effort needs to be devoted to the grafting or exfoliating of graphene, this low-cost green synthesis is of great significance for the industrial application.