A RUBBER NANOCOMPOSLTE ABLE TO EFFICIENTLY PREVENT WATER LEAKS WORLDWIDE

摘要

When transporting tap water or other liquids, the pumps, pipes, joints and valves are essential. Most of them are built with rubber sealants. These rubber sealants could significantly alter the usability, energy costs, and durability of the valves. Among several methods of sterilizing the bacteria present in the water, chlorine containing chemicals has been frequently used in order to obtain drinkable quality water following the world health organization guidelines. Unfortunately, chlorine is also a very reactive oxidizing halogen and could react instantly with most of organic materials. Therefore, rubber sealants could be chemically attacked by minute amounts of chlorine-containing compounds in the water, thus deteriorating their sealing ability which in turn results to a water leakage. In addition, chlorine degraded products including monomers, which are detached from the rubber sealants, could severely contaminate water. In such an environment, it is important that the rubber sealant placed on valves and joints must be durable and resistant to chlorine compounds. In this context, CNTs could act as ideal reinforcing fillers in polymer matrices so that composites thus produced would behave as efficient water sealants that could not be easily attacked by chlorine. In this study, we used surface modified CNTs that were uniformly incorporated in ethylene propylene rubber (EPDM). The surface modification applied to our MWCNTs also allowed their homogeneous dispersion in the rubber matrix.