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.