Natural rubber toughened carbon nanotube buckypaper and its multifunctionality in electromagnetic interference shielding, thermal conductivity, Joule heating and triboelectric nanogenerators

Flexible, lightweight, high-performance, and multifunctional characteristics are greatly desirable for next generation wearable electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding materials. In this work, a new kind of multifunctional natural rubber (NR) toughened carbon nanotube (CNT) buckypaper (NR-BP) with excellent comprehensive performance was fabricated by vacuum filtration of CNT/NR mixture dispersion. Due to the crosslinking of NR particles in CNT entanglement networks, the mechanical properties of NR-BP were improved profoundly while the conductivity had not been reduced significantly. When the NR content in NR-BP increased from 14.3 to 50 wt%, the tensile strength increased from 5.73 to 13.19 MPa, the fracture strain increased from 15.80 to 191.23%, and the conductivity reduced from 34.48 to 21.74 S/cm. The corresponding EMI shielding efficiency (EMI SE) and the specific EMI SE value (SSE/t) of the NR-BP with the thickness of 50 mu m was 31.9-28.3 dB and 8504-6232 dB.cm(2)/g in C-band range, respectively. The EMI SE of NR-BP remained basically unchanged after repeated 180 folding for 5000 times due to the excellent toughness. Besides EMI shielding performance, NR-BP's thermal conductivity (TC) and its application as Joule heating and flexible electrode for Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) were investigated. This work provides a new strategy for the preparation of multifunctional wearable electronic devices.

Automated summary

A new type of multifunctional natural rubber-toughened carbon nanotube buckypaper with excellent comprehensive performance was successfully fabricated in this study. It exhibited improved mechanical properties, maintained conductivity, and demonstrated high EMI shielding efficiency, showing great potential for wearable electronic devices.