Effect of nucleating agent incorporation on mechanical, morphological, and rheological properties of in-situ copolymer polypropylene and PP/POE Blends
Al-Otaibi Mansour N. (1)*, Al-Zahrani Saeed (1), Kioul Azzedine (2)
(1) King Saud University - Riyadh - SaudiArabia, (2) SABIC Plastic Applications Development Center - Riyadh - SaudiArabia
Toughening of homopolymer polypropylene (PPH) in the post reactor
step by incorporating external elastomers has become an attractive area of
research. In this investigative work, PPH was post-reactor blended with different
types of Polyolefin elastomers (POE) that were selected based on the co-monomer
type and density. The influence of three different level (10, 15, and 20 wt. %.) ofPOE on the mechanical, thermal, and morphology properties were investigated.
The performance behavior of PPH/POE blends with and without a nucleating agent
was compared to in situ (in the reactor) modified PPH with Ethylene Propylene
Rubber (EPR) known as Impact Copolymers Polypropylene (ICP) or heterophasic
polypropylene.
The addition of POE in PPH was shown to improve the toughness of the blends at
room temperature while the stiffness and tensile strength decreased. The addition of
a nucleating agent was noted to improve the toughness and stiffness of the above
mentioned blends compared to their non-nucleated counterparts, while the tensile
strength remained unchanged. The in-situ modified impact polypropylene (ICP) has
shown better mechanical properties than PPH/POE blends at the same level of rubber
content of 15 wt. %. On other hand, the nucleated ICP has presented similar impact
performance at room temperature compared to the nucleated blend PPH/POE with
15% POE based on C4 co-monomer. At -20 °C, the impact strength results showed
no significant improvement in PPH/POE blends with and without addition of the
nucleating agent and this could be due to the ductile-brittle transition does not taking
place at this temperature while, ICP shown better toughness at this temperature.
The morphology of PPH/POE blends was investigated by Scanning Electron
Microscopy (SEM). The SEM micrographs have shown clearly the phase separation
of the blends components thus demonstrating the immiscibility of the blend system.
The addition of the nucleating agent was seen to decrease the domain size of POE
phase thus leading to the improvement in the toughness properties of the blends. On
the other hand, ICP materials have shown more uniform dispersion of the elastomer
phase than the PPH/POE blends.
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