A composite is a material that consists of two or more materials or phases, whose final properties differ from those of the original materials. Polymers are extremely versatile materials that make good matrices (or hosts) in composites due to their extensive range of properties and processability. However, in almost all cases pure polymers are insulating, and this limits their application in some area. Adding conductive fillers to the polymer matrix yields composites that are also conductive, and these composites have many applications including conductive adhesives, lightning strike protection, electromagnetic shielding, anti-static components, optical and gas sensors. Traditional carbon-based fillers {such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and carbon black (CB)} make excellent candidates for conductive composites because of their high electrical conductivity combined with good mechanical properties.
Graphene has attracted significant scientific attention as a potential conductive filler. Graphene is a twodimensional sheet of carbon atoms, sp2 -bonded into a hexagonal arrangement. It has an exciting combination of properties, amongst which is its superb electrical conductivity (6 × 105 S m−1) when in a suitable isolated environment. There is now a family of graphene-related materials (GRMs), which differ from pure graphene in that they may contain multiple stacked layers (such as graphene nanoplatelets), or different chemical structures (such as graphene oxide).
Marya Raji and S Kalaiselvan thanks for your valuable suggestions. I am seeking to make my insulating polymer conductive just by dispersing graphene not by addition of some other conductive polymer. I am trying to achieve conductivity with graphene.
To achieve a conducting polymer with graphene or others conducting fillers, You need to crease a percolation threshold in which the conducting fillers connect together to form a conduncting pathway. The later depends on filler content, filler size, dispersion state of fillers and the conductivity of the filler ...
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It is not a simple question in reality as the nanocomposite conductivity percolation threshold depends both on the polymer nature and crystallinity, quality of the graphene (graphene oxide?) and on conditions of mixing (temperature, melting or solution one and in the latter case solvent nature, etc.). If you have e.g. a polymer with polar functional groups which can form multiple intermolecular bonds with graphene you can meet a problem to get suitable for you conductivity level at low filler loading. It depends)
You don't seem to have understood the term "percolation" although you are using it. This term is part of "percolation theory" which is a purely statistical theory, and its application onto polymer composites is based on 2 key assumptions:
1) There is NO interaction between the particles distributed in a matrix and this matrix.
2) The distribution is purely statistical, hence the particles are just only statistically evenly distributed.
Both these key assumptions are not valid in a polymer composite system, also not with graphene. Let me explain it a little bit more in detail in part 2 below.
In reality, "percolation theory" (and hence the term "percolation") can not be applied to Sagheer Gul's question. If you were to really investigate the structure and performance of a polymer composite containing submicron sized particles (whether conductive or not), you would find several results which contradict the approach to apply percolation theory:
1) Matrix molecules are adsorbing onto the surface of the dispersed particles, so there is an extremely strong interaction between the dispersed particles and the matrix polymer.
2) The particles are not at all statistically evenly distributed, but they are forming a very complex self-organized 3-dimensional network which finally allows at a concentration above a certain critical concentration (not: "above percolation point"!) to measure conductivity in case the dispersed particles are conductive.
3) The critical concentration is crucially dependant upon
a) how small you can disperse the particles - the smaller the particles, the lower the critical concentration
b) which polymer system you are using and what type of additives to prepare your composite.
All this tells you: this is nothing which obeys percolation theory, this is a completely different phenomenon which I have described here:
Article Electrical conductivity in heterogenous polymer systems (V) ...
and for which I have developed a special non-equilibrium theymodynamical theory:
Article Critical Shear Rate - the Instability Reason for the Creatio...