Effect of reactive compatibilizers on the morphology and properties of PET/HDPE/PP tertiary blends for piping industries**

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Soleno Inc. https://soleno.com/ is one of the largest companies in Québec in the fabrication of water pipelines, transportation equipment and textiles devices based on polymeric materials for various industrial applications. The main polymeric materials used in their products are the polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), common and low-cost polymers (1), presenting a high resistance to frost and anti-icing salts, outdoor weather conditions and good mechanical properties, which make them perfectly suited to various specific applications. ****Regarding its R&D activities, this company is interested in the incorporation of common plastic wastes in their plastic formulations to contribute to the environmental protection in the country (2) and to reduce the price. A new technological center with various technical platforms for polymeric processing at a large scale has been recently established for this purpose. Several projects are going on to solve the technical problems related to the incompatibility of these wastes. These projects, focused on the decontamination of recycled plastics and the development of new formulations based on PE wastes at the industrial scale, involve collaborations with academic institutions and another industrial company. ****One of the projects involves reusing recycled PET (RPET) in the formulations of polyolefin resins for the piping industry. This polymer is widely used in various application fields such as bottles (3), packaging, automobile parts (4) and tires (5) due to its mechanical properties and its flexible processing. We plan here to use PET fibers recycled from tires instead of PET bottles because they are readily available in large quantities, and they are cheap because their use at present is very limited. However, RPET fibers are incompatible with thermoplastic polyolefin resins (PE, PP) leading to poor mechanical performance. They are thermodynamically immiscible and the use of compatibilizers is needed (6-7). **