Dispersed Single-walled Carbon Research Articles

Smart Nanostructured Polymeric Coatings for Use as Remote optical Strain Sensors

Nanostructured polyurethane coatings have been developed with opto-mech. properties which make them suitable for performing stress-strain measurements via Raman spectroscopy. Two types of coatings were developed: microphase-sepd. copolyurethanes (DA-coPU) where the Raman active species are nanoscale-dispersed diacetylene-contg. hard segments (DA) that are produced in situ, and polyurethane nanocompositesfilled with dispersed HiPco single-wall carbon nanotubes. The use of SWNTs as strain sensitive Raman-active material has shown great potential compared to PbO coatings or even diacetylene crystals of DA-coPU. The use of polarized Raman spectroscopy on isotropic SWNT-PU and Da-coPU coatings which contain isotropic dispersions of resp. SWNTs or diacetylene crystals, allows the selection of species lying along the polarization direction. [on SciFinder (R)]