Study of the influence of nanoparticles on the behavior of composite materials

The objective of this work is to study the influence of additives of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) and silica nano-powder (SiO 2 ) on the mechanical behavior of epoxy resin . Different volume fractions of MWCNT and SiO 2 were added. Mechanical characterization by tensile, three-point bending and Charpy tests were carried out. The experimental results show an increase in the mechanical performance of the mixtures (MWCNT ​+ ​epoxy), (SiO 2  ​+ ​epoxy) up to 2% of additive. Beyond this value, a degradation of performance was observed. The addition of MWCNT gives better results when compared to the addition of SiO 2 . K IC -K CV correlations were made using empirical formulas to estimate the critical stress intensity factor K IC from the impact energy of the Charpy test.Unfortunately, this estimation does not provided a promising results, but other optimization methods were used to fit these empirical models to the behavior of our nanocomposites for which a good estimate was obtained after fitting these empirical models for SiO 2 .