Polymer composites with small amount of CNTs (< 5 wt%) have been studied as a light-weight wear-resistant material with low friction, among other applications, but their modulus improvement often plateaus or diminishes with increasing CNT fraction due to agglomeration. Here, polymer nanocomposites were fabricated with randomly oriented or aligned CNTs across their volume (up to 5 mm length) by CNT surface diazotization and by static magnetic field application (400 G for 40 min). With the improved CNT dispersion and thus less agglomeration, the reduced moduli of PNCs stayed improved with addition of up to 1 vol% (or 1.3 wt%) of CNTs. In this work, the PNCs with randomly oriented CNTs exhibited higher stiffness than the PNCs with magnetically aligned and assembled CNTs, indicating again the negative effect of CNT agglomeration on stiffness. In future, other CNT structuring methods with controlled inter-CNT contacts will be conducted to dissociate alignment from local agglomeration of CNTs and thus to simultaneously improve hardness and modulus of PNCs with small CNT addition.

已经研究了具有少量CNT（<5 wt％）的聚合物复合材料，作为具有低摩擦力的轻质耐磨材料，但是由于团聚，随着CNT含量的增加，它们的模量改善通常会趋于平稳或减弱。在这里，通过纳米碳管表面重氮化和通过施加静磁场（400 G，持续40分钟），在聚合物纳米复合材料的整个体积（最大5 mm长）中使用无规取向或排列的CNT来制造聚合物纳米复合材料。通过改善的CNT分散度，从而减少团聚，PNC的模量降低得以改善，最多可添加1 vol％（或1.3 wt％）的CNT。在这项工作中，具有随机取向的CNT的PNC表现出比具有磁性排列和组装的CNT的PNC更高的刚度，这再次表明CNT团聚对刚度的负面影响。