Over the last decade, academic and industrial scientists and engineers have become increasingly interested in tuning the properties of polymers by adding small quantities of nanoparticles. Polymers include plastics, rubbers, adhesives, and epoxies, and when nanoparticles are incorporated in them, these materials are called polymer nanocomposites. There is a vast array of nanoparticles available that can be sorted by shape into plates, spheres, and rods, where their smallest dimension is 1–100 nanometers.