Abstract
Oil was employed as an ‘entrance door’ for loading rubber with carbon-based fillers of different size and dimensionalities: 1D carbon nanotubes (CNTs), 2D graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs), and 3D graphite. This approach was explored, as a proof of concept, in the preparation of tire tread, where oil is commonly used to reduce the viscosity of the composite mixture. Rubber was loaded with carbon black (CB, always used) and one or more of the above fillers to enhance the thermal and mechanical properties of the composite. The CNT-loaded system showed the best enhancement in mechanical properties, followed by the CNT-GNP one. Rubber loaded with both graphite and GNP showed the best enhancement in thermal conductivity (58%). The overall enhancements in both mechanical and thermal properties of the various systems were analyzed through an overall relative efficiency index in which the total filler concentration in the system is also included. According to this index, the CNT-loaded system is the most efficient one. The oil as an ‘entrance door’ is an easy and effective novel approach for loading fillers that are in the nanoscale and provide high enhancement of properties at low filler concentrations.
Highlights
Rubbers are viscoelastic polymers in which long-chain molecules are entangled and crosslinked to form an elastic material
We studied the properties of rubber loaded with combinations of various types of fillers at a wide concentrations range
We compared the different systems based on their integrated enhancements and total filler weight fraction (TFF)
Summary
Rubbers are viscoelastic polymers in which long-chain molecules are entangled and crosslinked (i.e., vulcanized) to form an elastic material. There have been various reports on the application of nanocarbons, such as graphene nanoplatelets (GNP, 2D) and carbon nanotubes (CNT, 1D), as fillers for rubbers [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. These carbon allotropes are characterized with high intrinsic thermal conductivity (TC > 2000 W m−1 K−1 [15]) and mechanical properties
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