The physics and chemistry of nanoscale systems have advanced rapidly over the last few years and the prospect of translating these exciting scientific developments into a new generation of high technology products and processes improves daily. Since nanotechnology is a generic technology, it also has the potential to impact on a wide range of industrial sectors, from chemicals to electronics, from sensors to advanced materials.

A nanocomposite is a polymer system containing a usually inorganic particle with one dimension in the nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) range. The shapes of the particles used in the nanocomposites can be anything spherical, fibrillar or platelets. Platelets or fibrillar particles give maximum strength.

Structure of Graphite

The concept of intercalation of graphite is an old one but the systematic investigations have been only in the 40 years. Intercalation can be defined as the process, in which, guest specie is inserted into a lamellar host structure without the loss of structural features of the host. When these layers are so far apart from each other that little bonding is present between the layers to hold them together the structure is called Exfoliated.

One main objective of our research is to explore the structure, properties, and processing of fibers that contain nanoscale embedded rigid particles, in this case nylon 6 and graphite. A large portion of the fiber is effectively interfacial material with the two phases intimately blended. This gives enhanced mechanical properties, which are key for composite materials. It is promising that a loading of such small amounts of the particles — 2% on the weight of the polymer — large changes in mechanical properties can be gained.

The other objectives are to develop the methods to modify the chemistry of graphite surfaces to ensure its compatibility with polymers.

Intercalated Structure	Exfoliated Structure

Preliminary Results:

The films were prepared with nylon 6 and graphite treated with KBr was added to it depending upon the amount of loading. The mechanical properties, tensile modulus of these films have improved by almost 185% when compared to neat samples. The above improvement in the strength was obtained with just 2% loading of graphite.

Increase in Modulus with increase in the loading of graphite.