Title:
Interphase transfer of nanofillers between immiscible polymer pairs

Speaker:
Masayuki Yamaguchi
School of Materials Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Abstract:
The nanofiller transfer technique was demonstrated, which can be applicable to novel polymeric materials having nanoparticles on surface and/or phase-separated polymer blends with uneven distribution of fillers. It was found that nanoparticles immigrate from one polymer to another owing to the difference in the interfacial tension. For example, multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which prefer polycarbonate (PC) to polypropylene (PP), moved from PP to PC in the molten state of the polymers. Since the transfer process requires Brownian motion, more CNTs were transferred at high temperature and for a long exposure time of annealing. The laminated sheets were separated without any difficulty because of thin interfacial thickness between the immiscible polymers. Consequently, a PC sheet having CNTs only in the surface region was prepared. A similar phenomenon was detected for nanoparticles of silica in the laminated sheets composed of butadiene rubber (BR) and styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR), in which silica particles moved from SBR to BR, and showed nucleating ability for BR crystallization.