INTEMA   05428
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES EN CIENCIA Y TECNOLOGIA DE MATERIALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Melt processing of polymer nanocomposites reinforced with cellulose nanocrystals
Autor/es:
PEREDA, M; BRUZZESE, C.; EL KISSI, N.; DUFRESNE, A.
Lugar:
Montreal
Reunión:
Conferencia; 2012 TAPPI International Conference on Nanotechnology for Renewable Materials; 2012
Resumen:
The recent announcement of the large scale production of cellulose nanocrystals requires the use of more industrial processing techniques. Melt-compounding such as extrusion or injection molding, commonly used to process thermoplastic polymers, is infrequently employed for the preparation of cellulose nanocrystals reinforced polymer nanocomposites because of inherent incompatibility and thermal stability issues. Functionalization of the surface of the nanoparticles is most of the time a necessary step to avoid irreversible agglomeration during drying and aggregation in non-polar matrices because of the formation of additional hydrogen bonds. However, this strategy inducing an additional functionalization step is time-consuming and hardly compatible with an industrial application of cellulose-based nanocomposites. Moreover, cellulose nanocrystals present low thermal stability when heated at moderated temperatures, which prevent their processing with methods involving heat. This is ascribed to the introduction of sulfate groups resulting from the acid hydrolysis process involving sulfuric acid. All of these issues limit the processing of MFC or cellulose nanocrystal-based nanocomposites to wet processing methods such as casting/evaporation, which was extensively studied. We propose an easy and innovative physical way to process nanocomposite materials from an apolar matrix and cellulosic nanoparticles using conventional industrial techniques such as extrusion and injection molding. Preliminary results have shown that this simple strategy has been proved to be efficient and could be easily transposed to the industrial scale. It allows dispersing homogeneously cellulose nanocrystals without any surface chemical modification in a strongly apolar matrix such as polyethylene and avoids the thermal degradation of the nanoparticles upon extrusion.