pps proceeding - Abstract Preview
pps proceeding
Symposium: Nanocomposite Materials & Processing
Oral Presentation
 
 

Melt rheology issues of polypropylene based systems with enhanced thermal conductivity

Patti Antonella (1)*, Acierno Stefano (2), Acierno Domenico (3), Russo Pietro (4)

(1) University of Naples FedericoII - Napoli - Italy, (2) Department of Engineering, University of Sannio - Benevento - Italy, (3) INSTM – Centro di Riferimento per le Tecnologie di Processo di Polimeri e Compositi - Napoli - Italy, (4) National Council of Reaserch-Institute for Polymers, Composites and Biomaterials - Pozzuoli, NA - Italy

Polypropylene (PP) resins are extensively used in many industrial fields due to their ready availability, excellent processability and relatively low cost. At this regard, although a wide range of PP grades have been industrially developed, there is still a significant research interest to improve some specific properties of these polymers in order to make them suitable for further applications. For this reason, polypropylene is usually modified by inclusion of rigid reinforcements or fillers especially with nanometer sizes, given the well established advantages that can be drawn from their use with respect to microsized ones. Among the physical properties, a great deal is devoted to enhance PP thermal conductivity, being, more in general for all polymer based systems, much lower than the one characterizing metals or ceramic materials. As widely reported in the literature, this target may be satisfactorily achieved by including carbon fillers as carbon fibers, nanotubes, graphene, graphene oxide nanoplatelets, graphite nanoplatelets or considering hybrid formulations containing a secondary inorganic additive such as aluminium nitride, silicon carbide, zinc oxide, boron nitride to support and highlights performances related to the typical network structural organization of the primary carbon based nanoparticles. In this work, with the awareness that, although the addition of nanofillers is limited to relatively low contents, significant changes of the matrix viscoelasticity may occur and the rheological behavior of produced compounds may compromise the industrial processing, attention was mainly focused on the dynamic and steady-shear rheological behavior of binary and ternary polypropylene based systems prepared by melt mixing.