Phase-separated morphology and resulting electrical properties of palphaMSAN/PMMA blends without and with carbon nanotubes: compatibilization as a tool

The demand for flexible conductive polymeric materials is on the rise in applications such as EMI shielding and supercapacitors. In this perspective, immiscible blends containing conductive nanoparticles offer tremendous possibilities to tune electrical properties by tailoring their biphasic morphology combined with selective particle localization. The research aims at unraveling the relations between the microstructure of polymer blends and the resulting dielectric properties. In particular, copolymers with suitable physical characteristics were employed to refine and stabilize the cocontinuous morphology of biphasic polymer blends containing carbon nanotubes. This further allowed to concurrently develop a percolated carbon nanotube network and a microcapacitor network of carbon nanotubes with enclosed dielectric polymer chains. As a result, an increase by several decades of magnitude in the electrical conductivity and dielectric interfacial capacitance of the blends were respectively achieved.