POLYPROPYLENE NANOCOMPOSITES CONTAINING CARBON NANOTUBE AND REDUCED GRAPHENE OXIDE: SYNTHESIS AND PROPERTIES

摘要

Polypropylene (PP) is a broadly applicable polymeric material with extremely high performance/cost ratio. There have been continuing efforts to further broadening its application envelop, trying to make full use of the fantastic material. As such, PP has become an open polymer that welcomes modifications on both molecular and material levels. Carbon nanotube (CNT) and graphene (G) are two carbon nano materials with very high mechanical properties and second-to-none electrical and thermal conductivities. Plainly it should be expected that, once they have been exhaustively and uniformly dispersed in PP to form nanocomposites for real, these two nano materials will be significantly beneficial to PP's material properties including, among others, mechanical strengths as well as moduli and, after reaching a certain volume fraction, may even endow their unique electrical and thermal conductivities to the host polymer drastically altering some of its characteristic properties. These are what these nano materials can contribute to PP, but not all. With a powerful molecular tailoring methodology, we have been able to obtain PP/CNT and PP/G dispersion systems with much strengthened interfacial interaction and thus controlled morphological stability. This ensures realization of the above-mentioned -ano effects" by CNT and G. What's more, the ubiquitous existence of the nano materials especially the one-dimensional CNT in PP matrix provides a unique way to resolve some of long-standing problems within PP itself including, among others, the poor interphase interaction in heterophasic PP/EPR copolymers that influence their phase morphology as well as ultimate properties, and the difficulty of making compatible PP/polar polymer alloy without macroscopic phase separation. In all, I will introduce our understanding of what and how carbon nantube and graphene can contribute to polypropylene during my talk in the conference.