Polycaprolactone/clay nanocomposites: From preparation to final behaviour

LEANDRO LUDUEÑA; ANALÍA VAZQUEZ; JOSÉ KENNY; VERA ALVAREZ

Madrid, España

Congreso; 6th International ECNP Conference on NANOSTRUCTURED POLYMERS AND NANOCOMPOSITES; 2010

Because of waste accumulation at the end of the life cycle of traditional polymer products, the development of environmental friendly, degradable, polymeric materials has attracted extensive interest. Polycaprolactone (PCL) is a chemically synthesised polymer based on caprolactone units. It does not occur in nature but it is fully biodegradable. In order to obtain a competitive product, the PCL performance can be greatly enhanced with the addition of nanometer-size inorganic fillers. In this work several strategies were used to obtain well-dispersed nanocomposites. In all cases the clay dispersion was characterized by wide angle X-ray diffractometry (WAXS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Melt rheology was used as a novel method to study the morphology of polymer/clay nanocomposites. Several authors have analyzed the shear thinning exponent as a semi-quantitative measure of the clay dispersion degree inside a polymer matrix. In this study we propose another rheological parameter to compare the clay dispersion degree between the different materials that, to our knowledge, has not been reported before. This method has the advantages that the information obtained is representative of the whole sample instead of small zones of it and samples do not need to be specially conditioned.