MECHANICAL AND FRACTURE EVALUATION OF POLYOLEFIN FILMS CHEMICALLY MODIFIED WITH ACRYLIC ACID AS GRAFTING AGENT

F.CLEMENTE; L FASCE; V. PETTARIN; P- FRONTINI; V. COSTAMAGNA; M. STRUMIA

Los cocos

Simposio; ARCHIPOL; 2005

In many applications it is necessary to change and/or to improve some of the polymeric surface properties without modifying the bulk properties of the material. Therefore, there is much interest in the surface modification of polyolefins to create different and new surface properties (Kato et al, 2003). Modified polymer surfaces have such a number of applications as adhesion, wettability, printability, antifogging, biocompatibility and dyeability. Among the methods of modifications of polymers, graft co-polymerization is an attractive method to impart a variety of functional groups to a polymer (Bhattacharya and Misra, 2004). Polypropylene (PP) is one of the most used plastics at present in a very wide range of applications (Moore, 1996). Owing to the hydrophobic nature of PP, and the absence of any reactive functional groups in its molecular structure, its use in certain applications faces some problems. Modification of PP through a grafting technique is considered to be one of the main routes to overcome these problems (Naguib et al, 2003) The aim of this work is the evaluation of the effect of surface graft co-polymerization with acrylic acid previously presented (Costamagna et al, 2005) on the bulk mechanical properties of commercial PP films.