A giant electrorheological fluid with a long lifetime and good thermal stability based on TiO2 inlaid with nanocarbons

Abstract

The bottleneck in the application of electrorheological (ER) fluids is the difficulty of simultaneously meeting both the performance and lifetime demands. In this paper, we propose to replace the polar molecules adsorbed on particles with nanoconductors and successfully synthesized a novel giant ER fluid made of TiO₂ particles inlaid with nanocarbon clusters (jujube cake structures) by a simple modified hydrolysis-precipitation method to break this bottleneck. Its giant ER effect originates from the polarization of nanocarbon clusters in a local field produced by the polar charges of TiO₂ particles and the strong interaction forces between the nanocarbon clusters and between a nanocarbon cluster and the polar charges on the adjacent TiO₂ particles. Moreover, the jujube cake structure of the C-TiO₂ particles is stable enough to withstand mechanical wear and high temperature, so the material shows a high yield stress, long lifetime, small current leakage and good thermal stability, and is believed to be a promising candidate for practical ER fluids.