Nanocomposites base polymère, renforcés par des particules rigides

Polymer based composite materials, often exhibit specific mechanical behaviors when the size of particulate fillers is in the nanometric range. It seems that this specificity could be related to the fact that in this case, the average distance between the filler surfaces has the same order of magnitude than the characteristic macromolecules dimensions, such as the coil diameter, etc. Above the glass transition temperature Tg, these materials display sometimes a much larger reinforcement effect than for classical composites. This can be related to the existence of networks involving either particle/macromolecules/particle or direct particle/particle interactions. In this brief review, the effect of (i) filler shape factor and volume fraction, and (ii) the processing methods are discussed through several examples, as well as some information about modeling aspects, both under linear and non linear conditions.