Direct Measurement of the Interfacial Attractions between Functionalized Graphene and Polymers in Nanocomposites

The objective of this work is to characterize and thereby achieve a fundamental scientific understanding at the molecular level of the relationship of the inter molecular forces measured at the nano scale between an individual nano particle and a polymer system. In this paper, we developed a method to directly characterize and measure the relative strength of the interfacial attractive forces between graphene nano particles and the polymer on the nano length scale of an individual particle using AFM techniques. The method was successfully applied to study the interfacial attractive strength in graphene polymer nano-composites. Two polymers poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) were studied. The results support that this method is capable of characterizing the interfacial attractive forces directly at the nano-scale of graphene with a macromolecule material. The method can be applied to other nano particle macromolecular systems allowing determination of the interaction strength between nano-particles and the macromolecular material. This information paves the way to characterize, then to predict and finally optimize a nano particle, macromolecular system's performance properties.