Polymer nanocomposites based on Graphite Nanoplatelets and amphiphilic graphene platelets

During the last decades, Graphene Nanoplatelets (GNPs) have received increasing attention in industrial and academic fields due to their outstanding electrical, thermal and mechanical properties. Graphene is still hard to produce in large quantity and at low cost, but GNPs have been identified as a substitute for graphene, due to their large production rates and low costs. GNPs are commonly employed in many applicative fields, such as 3D printing, nanocomposites in automotive and aerospace, conductive pastes, electronic devices and many others. This review summarize the development of GNP/polymer nanocomposites in recent years, and it is divided in three sections: the first describes the preparation technique for GNPs and the synthetic routes for AGNPs, with particular attention to the top-down approaches; in the second section, the mixing techniques for GNPs/polymer nanocomposites preparation and the resulting microstructure are illustrated; in the final section, the electrical, the thermal and the mechanical properties of hybrid systems are presented and discussed, correlating the GNPs characteristics to the derived nanocomposite properties.