COMPARING THE POLYURETHANE-HECTORITE AND POLYURETHANE-MONTMORILLONITE NANOCOMPOSITES

摘要

The nanoreinforcements for the polymer matrices have become very important.Polyurethane is very important polymer which is used in many applications including the automotive,paint,adhesive,foam and biomedical applications.The applications of the polyurethane have been increased with increase in the mechanical properties.Nanocomposites based on clays offer many advantages compared to other reinforcing materials.In this study the mechanical properties of the polyurethane matrix has been increased with nanoclays.The use of natural hectorite has been done first in our group and has been presented in IUPAC Polymer Conference(PSK30:IUPAC International Symposium on Advanced Polymers for Emerging Technologies,10-13 October 2006,Busan,Korea).We had discovered that exfoliated structures have been obtained with no organic modifier.The solvent has the capacity to swell the clay,hectorite.In this study,hectorite has been compared with another natural clay montmorillonite(MMT).Exfoliated structures have been obtained with MMT as well with no organic modifier which indicates that we have used the right solvent to swell both of the clays.We had observed that the hectorite has much better properties than the commonly used nanoclay montmorillonite.The properties of these two nanocomposites will be discussed and evaluated.