An experimental study to investigate the effect of aluminum nanorod-reinforced epoxy matrix nanocomposites

The current study deals with the fabrication of crosslinked epoxy composites rein forced with several loadings of aluminum nanorods (i.e., 5, 10, 15 and 20) wt% by a hand lay-up technique. Both pyromellitic dianhydride and glycerin utilized as cross linker agents. The thermal, morphological and mechanical properties of the resultant composites were characterized as a function of nanorods content and type of cross linker using a wide range of analytical and testing techniques. The results showed that using a combination of pyromellitic dianhydride and glycerin provide more adhesion efficiently between the nanorods and epoxy compared to the individual cross-linker. Also, the results demonstrated that both tensile and flexural strengths, and their moduli were increased with adding nanorods content up to 15 wt% fol lowed by the moderate improvement. The maximum value of tensile, flexural strengths, tensile modulus and flexural modulus are ~ (6000, 96, 5000, 10,000) MPa, respectively; for crosslinked epoxy composites, which are higher than of pure epoxy by ~ (20, 37, 56, 53)%. Comparably, thermal degradation temperature (i.e., 300 °C) of the plain epoxy is shifted slightly toward higher temperature after the cross-link ing reaction, which is likely due to a good interaction between epoxy molecules leads to an improvement in the thermal stability of the composite materials. In addi tion, both glass transition and melting temperatures of the crosslinked epoxy sam ples increased from by 37.6% and 11.7%, respectively. These results correlate with images from scanning electron microscopy, which showed less agglomeration and good distribution of nanorods particles into the crosslinked epoxy matrix