1.1 Why Nanocomposites?

During the past decade, nanocomposites have become a new class of materials that circumvent classic composite material performance by accessing new properties and exploiting unique synergism between materials. This only occurs when the length scale of morphology and the fundamental effects associated with a property coincide on the nanoscale. Indeed, the nanoscale can lead to new phenomena, providing opportunities for novel multifunctional materials applications. The rapidly growing area of nano-engineered materials will develop many perspectives for plastics and composites dictated by the final application of the polymer nanocomposites.

Polymer nanocomposites were developed in the late 1980s in both commercial research organisations and academic laboratories. The term 'nanocomposites' was used first in 1984 by Roy and Komarneni [1, 2] to emphasise the fact that the polymeric product consisted of two or more phases each in the nanometre size range. Since then, the term 'nanocomposite' has been universally accepted as describing a very large family of materials involving structures in the nanometre size range (e.g., 1 100 nm), where the properties are of interest due to the size of the structures, and are typically different from those of the bulk matrix [1 5]. The first company to commercialise polymer/ layered silicate nanocomposites was Toyota [6, 7], which used nanocomposite parts in the production of their novel car models. Later, a number of other companies also began investigating nanocomposites, which resulted in a dramatic expansion of the research and commercial interests in this novel class of materials in broad fields...