Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SB4-O022
PIEZORESISTIVE AND THERMORESISTIVE CHARACTERIZATION OF
CARBON HYBRID NANOCOMPOSITES
Raúl Armando Pech Pisté 1,2 , Fidel Fernando Gamboa Perera 3 , Alejandro May Pat 1 , Marco
Antonio Cen Puc 1 , Abraham Isaías Balam Mena 1 , Francis Avilés Cetina 1
1
Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán, Materials, Mexico. 2 Universidad Autónoma de
Yucatán, Physics Engineering, Mexico. 3 Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del
IPN - CINVESTAV, Applied Physics, Mexico.
Sensors are a valuable component of many electro-mechanical systems, with
scientific, industrial and even domestic applications. For this reason, it is
important to develop smaller and more sensitive sensors which are flexible,
conformable and adaptable to several shapes and applications. One of these
applications comprises measurement of pressure/load or strain in elements
subjected to mechanical loads, application for which piezoresistive sensors have
been developed. Temperature is another common measuring parameter which
employs resistive sensors, such as thermistors, which present a dependence on
their electrical resistance with temperature (thermoresistance).
One of the alternatives to develop flexible (polymeric) nanocomposites with
strain and temperature sensing capabilities is to use carbon nanostructures as
fillers. During the last decades, the interest of carbon nanostructures such as
carbon nanotubes and the familiy of graphenic materials have tremendously
increased. Those carbon nanostructures render the composite multifunctional
and sensing characteristics, offering the opportunity for being used as sensors
and/or actuators. Nanocomposites filled with carbon nanostructures can form
conductive networks at very low filler concentrations, and such effective electric
resistance becomes a function of strain and temperature. Given this motivation,
the aim of this work is to develop polymeric nanocomposites filled with hybrid
carbon nanostructures and characterize their piezoresistive and
thermoresistive behavior. To achieve this goal, carbon nanotubes and few-layer
graphene nanoplatelets are mixed with polysulfone to fabricate
nanocomposites at various filler contents. Tensile tests and heating-cooling
cycles will be conducted on the hybrid nanocomposites while measuring their
electrical resistance changes, in order to investigate their piezoresistive and
thermoresistive responses