Nanocomposites

6Multiscale Modeling of Graphene-polymer Nanocomposites with Tunneling Effect

Xiaoxin LU^1,2,3, Julien YVONNET², Fabrice DETREZ² and Jinbo BAI³

¹Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

²MSME, Gustave Eiffel University, Marne-la-Vallée, France

³CentraleSupélec, Paris-Saclay University , Gif-sur-Yvette, France

6.1. Introduction

The introduction of graphene-based nanomaterials has prompted the development of flexible nanocomposites for emerging applications in various fields, including energy conversion (Britnell et al. 2013), energy storage (El-Kady and Kaner 2013), electronic materials (Kim et al. 2009), sensors (Mannoor et al. 2012) and chemical screening applications (Guo et al. 2013). Graphene is among the materials with the highest in-plane electric conductivity (Novoselov et al. 2004), and its incorporation in a polymer matrix to increase the electric conductivity of almost insulating polymers is of high importance for materials-by-design. Numerous experimental and theoretical studies have reported that dispersing two-dimensional fillers such as graphene sheets in a polymer matrix can significantly improve the electric properties of the resulting composites (Liang et al. 2009, Kim and Macosko 2009, Hicks et al. 2009, Qi et al. 2011, Wang et al. 2015, He and Tjiong 2013). They exhibit an increase in several orders of magnitude of the electric conductivity, even at extremely low volume fractions of graphene sheets (Fan et al. 2012, Tkalya ...