Study On Improving Thermal Insulation Property Of Nylon With Vermiculite/Polyaromaticethersulfone With Cardo Group (PES-C) Composite Membrane

In recent years, organic/inorganic nano-composites have attracted extensive attention in material technology because of their excellent performance. Vermiculite, with special multi-layered structure and lots of gas and bound water between the layers, has a good reflection of thermal radiation and excellent thermal-insulating property, which enables it to resist high temperature and makes it widely concerned in organic/inorganic nano-composite field. The study of vermiculite now focuses on the chemical modification and nano composition of it with different polymers to improve their mechanical properties. Few reports were found to study on the addition of vermiculite into polyaromaticethersulfone with cardo group (PES-C) to improve the thermal-insulating property of PES-C. And reports on mixing vermiculite with PES-C to form vermiculite/PES-C composite membrane and then coat it on nylon have not been found yet.In this paper, vermiculite and PES-C, which was used as the continuous phase, were blended together and then treated onto nylon via liquid-solid (L-S) phase inversion technique. The heat-resistant and thermal-insulating properties of nylon were improved because of the good performance of vermiculite and PES-C. The detailed research work was listed as below:1. Orthogonal and horizontal experiments were designed to study the effects of vermiculite type, concentration and coat thickness on the viscosity-average molecular weight and mechanical properties of the aged nylon, which was coated by vermiculite/PES-C composite membrane. The optimal formulation of coating were found;2. Orthogonal experiments were designed to study the effects of vermiculite type, concentration and coat thickness on the thermal conductivity of coated nylon;3. The TPP values were tested to study the effect of vermiculite concentration on thermal protective performance of coated nylon, and the factor which had the greatest influence on TPP value was found;4. Thermal decomposition kinetics of vermiculite/PES-C composite coated nylon were also investigated. The effect of vermiculite on decomposition kinetic parameters of the whole system was discussed to study the thermal protection property of vermiculite/PES-C composite membrane coated on nylon.The results showed that vermiculite/PES-C composite membrane can improve the aging resistance and thermal-insulating property of coated nylon. The concentration of vermiculite is a more important factor than vermiculite type and coating thickness. Adding a certain amount of vermiculite can enhance the aging resistance and thermal-insulating property of coated nylon. However, those properties would not be good if too much vermiculite were added, because of the aggregation of vermiculite particles. The investigation of thermal decomposition kinetics showed that vermiculite could increase the activation energy E and thermal decomposition order n of nylon. So vermiculite enhanced the fireproof and heat insulation properties of nylon by increasing activation energy barrier and decreasing decomposition rate.