Enhanced toughness and glass transition temperature of epoxy nanocomposites filled with solvent-free liquid-like nanocrystal-functionalized graphene oxide

Highlights: • The route to prepare solvent-free liquid-like nanocrystal-functionalized graphene oxide had little influence on the nanocrystals attached to the surface of graphene oxide. • The synthetic material exhibited good solubility and dispersion in solvents and polymer matrix. • The synthetic material could simultaneously enhancing toughness and glass transition temperature of epoxy nanocomposites derived from the outer organic shell. A solvent-free liquid-like nanocrystal-functionalized graphene oxide was successfully prepared. Its morphology, chemical structure and multifunction were extensively characterized by various analysis technologies. It was found that the liquid-like nanocrystal-functionalized graphene oxide could flow at room temperature without any solvents and remained magnetic with a saturation magnetization about 2.57 emu/g. Moreover, it exhibited good dispersion in various solvents and polymer matrix. Subsequently, it was incorporated into epoxy matrix to investigate the toughness and glass transition temperature of the resulting nanocomposites. The results indicated that it could simultaneously improve the impact toughness and glass transition temperature of neat epoxy by 138.12% and 33.05 °C at the 1.0 wt.% fraction.