Heating-activated radicals of fluorinated multiwalled carbon nanotubes assisted interfacial grafting rubber composites with electromagnetic wave absorption

Abstract Limited mechanical strength of rubbers due to poor interfacial bonding strength with fillers is a main factor to restrict further applications. In this article, chemical activity of dormant radicals on fluorinated carbon nanotubes (FCNTs) were proved to have temperature dependence, which was utilized to graft with natural rubbers during heat-vulcanization with well-combined interfaces. We adopted isoprene annealing with different FCNTs, High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HR-TEM) images calculated different grafting thickness revealed the initiation abilities of FCNTs are highly related to their fluorine contents. Compared with neat natural rubber, tensile strength of FCNTs reinforced rubber composites improved by 105.1% at most, while the tensile strength of pristine carbon nanotubes reinforced rubber composites was increased by only 22.2%. Besides, according to the highly improved impedance matching property and remained conduction loss of FCNTs, the composite showed excellent microwave absorption properties that displays a minimum reflection loss (RL) of −64.31 dB in X band.