Polymer nanocomposites reinforced with POSS modified clay

• Main Author: Yang, Jia Xing
• Other Authors: Lu Xuehong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Materials::Composite materials
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/35658
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Polymer clay nanocomposite is a property enhanced material that incorporates clay into polymer matrix. As one of the high thermal stability clay modifier, imidazolium polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes (POSS) surfactant is very suitable to be clay surfactant for high processing temperature polyethylene terephthalate (PET) polymer. However, POSS modified clay has high aggregation tendency and constraints the degree of POSS modified clay dispersion in polymer. Thus, our work is to use the shearing force of milling to reduce the POSS modified clay aggregates size. The POSS modified clays underwent different freeze-milling cycles to fractionate the clay aggregates into smaller size. Freeze-milled POSS modified clays were sieved and melt intercalated with PET, before they were characterized by XRD and POM. POM images revealed that freeze-milling had reduced the clay aggregates size significantly, while WAXD analysis shown decreased of intensity of ordered clay peaks as freeze-milling cycles increased. Higher the freeze-milling cycles, more big clay agglomerates were fractionated to smaller clay particles and lower the intensity of ordered clay structure WAXD peaks. These smaller clay particles may facilitate the intercalation of polymer chain into the clay interlayer. In future, TEM is a must to identify the polymer intercalation of freeze-milled POSS modified clay and characterize the degree of clay dispersion in polymer.