Aligned carbon nanotube/polymer composite fibers with improved mechanical strength and electrical conductivityElectronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/c1jm13769g

In order to improve their practical applications, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been widely spun into fibers. However, both mechanical strength and electrical conductivity of the CNT fibers are far from the applications. Therefore, a second phase such as polymer has been introduced to increase their strength, but their conductivity further decreases due to the insulating or the low-conductivity action of the incorporated polymer. In this work, we have developed a general and effective route to fabricate CNT/polymer fibers through the introduction of monomers during an easy solution process followed by an in situ polymerization. The resulting composite fibers show an increased tensile strength and an improved electrical conductivity compared with either the pure CNT fibers or the CNT/polymer fibers prepared by the direct incorporation of polymers. This work demonstrates a fabrication methodology to design and synthesize high-quality CNT/polymer composite materials. A general and effective route has been developed to fabricate aligned carbon nanotube/polymer fibers which show both improved mechanical strength and electrical conductivity compared with pure carbon nanotube fibers.