Chemically and uniformly grafting carbon nanotubes onto carbon fibers by poly(amidoamine) for enhancing interfacial strength in carbon fiber composites

We propose a novel method to chemically and uniformly graft carbon nanotubes (CNTs) onto carbon fiber (CF) using poly(amido amine) to form the CNT–CF hierachical reinforcement, as confirmed by XPS and SEM. The micro-bond test result shows that the hierarchical structure results in remarkable improvement of interfacial properties.