Polypropylene/polyethylene (PP/PE) nanocomposites for advanced applications

在这项与工业界的合作研究中，我们将以聚乙烯/聚丙烯（PE/PP）为基础，与碳纳米管（CNT）、石墨烯纳米带（GNR）、碳纳米纤维（CNF）和纳米粘土等先进纳米材料共混，创造聚合物共混纳米复合材料。聚合物纳米复合材料是未来的材料，由于极高的界面面积和填料尺寸与聚合物分子尺寸的相似性，聚合物纳米复合材料可以获得以前无法实现的性能组合。正因为如此，纳米复合材料目前被用于高科技应用；预计到2018年，该行业的规模将达到60亿美元，但人们对材料化学和聚合物加工如何影响这些纳米复合材料的结构和最终性能知之甚少。航空航天和公共交通行业热衷于开发基于纳米材料的新材料，我们建议创造新材料和开发新技术，以帮助他们开发这一新领域。**在过去的十年中，我们的团队在电磁干扰屏蔽、电导率和介电常数/损耗等电性能方面处于领先地位。哈金森航空航天希望与我们合作，利用我们在纳米材料方面的专业知识，特别是导电纳米复合材料，为他们的产品在EMI屏蔽等领域创造新的细分市场。他们是催化剂技术和定制聚烯烃结构的专家。这两个集团在聚合物共混物方面都有重要的专业知识。我们的学术和他们的行业专长的结合是非常协同的。纳米复合材料领域的研究通常集中在某些方面，如纳米材料的合成和表征或聚合物的合成或复合材料的加工和表征。尽管在每个或几个开发步骤上都进行了出色的工作，但如果我们要取得重大突破，将新型多相材料创造的所有不同方面联系起来是至关重要的。执行材料开发的所有步骤的独特能力为这些连接提供了重要的优势和能力。**************

In this collaborative research with industry, we will create polymer blend nano composites based on polyethylene/polypropylene (PE/PP) blends with advanced nano materials such as carbon nanotubes (CNT), graphene nano ribbons (GNR) and carbon nanofiber (CNF) and nano clay. Polymer nanocomposites are materials of the future and can access property combinations previously unachievable because of exceptionally high interfacial area and similarity of filler size to the polymer molecular size. Because of this, nanocomposites are currently used in high technology applications; and the industry is predicted to be $6 Billion in size by 2018, yet there is little understanding about how materials chemistry and polymer processing influences structure and final properties of these nano composites. The aerospace and mass transit industries are keen to develop new materials based on nano materials and we propose to create new materials and develop new technologies to help them exploit this new area.** In the last decade, our group become a leading authority on electrical properties such as EMI shielding, electrical conductivity, and dielectric permittivity/loss. Hutchinson Aerospace would like to partner with us to leverage our expertise in nanomaterials, particularly, conductive nanocomposites to create new market segments for their products in areas like EMI shielding. They are experts on catalyst technology and customizing polyolefin structure. Both of the groups have significant expertise in polymer blends. The combination of our academic and their industry expertise is extremely synergistic. Researchers in the nanocomposite field typically focus on certain aspects, e.g. synthesis and characterization of nanomaterial or polymer synthesis only or processing and characterization of composite only. Though there has been excellent work performed on each, or on a couple of, the development steps, it is critical to link all the different aspects of creation of novel multiphase materials if we are to have major breakthroughs. The unique ability to perform all the steps of material development provides a significant advantage and capability to make these linkages.**************