Abstract
About 90 of the volcanic rocks worldwide are basalt rocks utilized to produce basalt fibers. They are considered insulators electrically. Herein, the basalts' electrical/dielectric properties have been significantly enhanced by introducing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) to the basalt nanosized. We obtained nanosized basalt powders using ball milling with an average particle size of 67.86 nm. The basalt nano-powders were suspended on ethanol and mixed with SWCNT under rigorous sonication and stirring. Basalt/SWCNT nanocomposites were produced with SWCNT ratios 0, 1, 3, and 5 wt%. We evaluated their electrical conductivity, dielectric constant, and dielectric loss at different frequencies and temperatures ranging from room temperature (RT) to 1200 Kelvin. The results at 20 kHz revealed that the pure basalts' electrical conductivity was 1.16 x 10(-7) S/cm at RT. At the same time, it was 0.03, 0.19, and 0.46 S/cm for the basalt/SWCNT nanocomposites at the SWCNT ratios 1, 3, and 5 wt%, respectively. These results proved that the basalts turned from insulators to become conductors even at the lowest ratio of SWCNT, i.e., 1 wt%. The basalt/SWCNT nanocomposites' dielectric constant increased thousands of folds compared with pure basalts. Besides, theoretical calculations demonstrated a superior electromagnetic interference shielding (EMI) performance for the prepared nanocomposites. This study's findings could open new horizons for using SWCNT in basalt for EMI shielding applications.
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