Preparation And Characterization Of Poly(Butylene Succinate) /Montmorillonite Nanocomposite

Poly(butylene succinate) is a biodegradable polyester that is attracting more and more attention because of its excellent mechanical properties and processability. It has a widely application in packaging, disposable tableware and biomedical materials. But its Vicat softening point is only 98℃, and its elasticity module is low too, all these things have limited its application greatly. In this paper, we prepared the Poly(butylene succinate)/Montmorillonite nanocomposite via direct melt intercalation and in-situ polymerization of PBS and organic montmorillonite.The main results of this work are summarized as follows:A series of Poly(butylene succinate)/Montmorillonite composites were successfully prepared via direct melt intercalation of PBS and organic montmorillonites. The composites were characterized with Gel Permeation Chromatography(GPC), X-rays Diffraction(XRD), Scanning Electronic Microscopy(SEM) , Molau experiment etc. The results reveale that the composites prepared with the OMMT that is organically modified well are nanocomposites, but these prepared with the bad organically modified OMMT are filled-in composites.For the nanocomposites, the improvement of mechanical properties and Vicat softening point is much higher compared with the filled-in composites. With the content of OMMT increasing, the improvement of mechanical properties and Vicat softening point increase at first then decrease, and reaches the maximum at 3% content. The composites have a well biodegradability, and with the content of OMMT increasing, the biodegradability is becoming better.Poly(butylene succinate)/Montmorillonite nanocomposite was prepared via in-situ polymerization with 1,4-butanediol , succinic acid and OMMT. The kind and content of OMMT, the method of adding OMMT were carefully studied. And we attained the best situation of in-situ polymerization. Then a pilot scale experiment was successfully processed by the best situation.The composites were characterized with GPC, XRD, SEM , Molau experiment and mechanical property and Vicat softening point tests etc. The results reveal that the composites of the pilot scale is a nanocomposite, the OMMT is nicely distributed within PBS matrix, the composites has a significantly increased interlayer distance, the mechanical properties and Vicat softening point are greatly increased in comparison with the pure PBS. With the organic modification of the OMMT becoming better, the intercalation of PBS matrix into the MMT layers increases, but the biodegradability of the composites decreases.From all the results above, we can conclude that the in-situ polymerization is better than the melt intercalation method because that the former don't need the melt process after the polymerization, and the properties of the composite increase greatly compared with the pure PBS, so it should be the best method to prepare the PBS/MMT nanocomposite.