Polymer Grafting to Single‐Walled Carbon Nanotubes: Effect of Chain Length on Solubility, Graft Density and Mechanical Properties of Macroscopic Structures

Single-walled carbon nanotubes are grafted with polystyrene chains employing a graft-to protocol. Thermogravimetric analysis allows calculation of the grafted chain density and average interchain separation on the nanotube surface as a function of molecular weight. The separation scales with molecular weight as a power law with an exponent of ca. 0.588, showing the grafted chains to be in a swollen random walk conformation. This implies that …