Development of High Throughput Methods for Polymer Nanocomposite Research

摘要

A HT method has been developed, which offers rapid preparation of nanocomposite and conventional-filler polymer libraries using twin-screw extrusion. This method allows preparation of homogeneous and gradient type samples. A HT method has also been developed for determining the flammability properties of the above polymer libraries. The flame spread measurements that are used to evaluate the flammability properties, take advantage of the gradient approach in two different manners. First, the homogeneous polymer samples are screened using a flux gradient. This determines under what combination of conditions (imposed flux, polymer type and flame retardant concentration) the sample will exhibit self-extinguishing behavior. Second, gradient polymer samples are screened using a constant flux. By combining these HT methods (extrusion and flame spread) the rate of data generation has been accelerated by at least 50 times! Furthermore, the structure-property relationships revealed in this work would not have been so easily learned without these HT approaches. Work is planned to combine the gradient flux and a series of different homogeneous samples in a larger flame spread device so that we can have a compositional variation orthogonal to the flux gradient.