Morphology control in hierarchical fibers for applications in hair flow sensors

Whiskerized fibers, including carbon nanotube coated structural fibers, offer materials scientists new design spaces to manipulate many structural and functional properties of composite materials, such as interlaminar toughness, thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity, delamination resistance, and shear strength. They also provide the potential to sense strain before, during, and after composite curing. However, studies examining both how to control CNT morphology grown on structural fibers and the effect of CNT morphology on these properties have remained limited. Thus, a major component to designing and optimizing of structural composite material systems with arrays of CNT materials is currently lacking. This work presents the systematic synthesis of CNT arrays on individual glass fibers (GF) to create hierarchical CNT-GF "whiskerized" fibers with controlled morphology. The piezoresistive properties of these fibers are also examined in the absence of resin for potential application as biologically-inspired strain sensors and include insertion into a capillary pore in order to mimic an artificial hair cell.