Thermosetting materials suffer from a lack of electrical conductivity. In order to overcome this barrier, a natural strategy is to introduce conductive fillers above the percolation threshold. However, addition of fillers usually leads to an increase of viscosity of the formulation which precludes infusing the resin through the porous bed of carbon fibers. In order to solve this problem, we aim at creating a two phase material and locate the fillers at the interface in order to decrease the percolation at very low values.With this view, this study is divided into two parts. The first one concerns the control of multiphase composites in order to get a co-continuous morphology by a strategy called Reaction Induced Phase Separation (RIPS). Phase diagram and influence of parameters have been studied.The second part is the formulation of a composite material (thermoplastic/thermoset) in presence of inorganic fillers. We developed two differents processes which allowed us to control fillers localisation in the blend. A process called “one shot” allows to locate homogeneously inorganic particles in epoxy phase. A second process called “premix” would preferentially locate conductive fillers at the interface of the interpenetrating system.Diffusion of particles at the interface was observed in situ during the curing of a biphasic thermoset material permitting to open the road of conducting materials and a conductivity around 10-1 S/m has been reached using as low as 5 wt% carbon black. The concept of localization of filler has been valided on several systems.
