Controlled Wetting and Nanostructuring in Multiple Phase Biopolymers

尽管生物聚合物在过去十年中在塑料工业中的使用出现了戏剧性的增长，但开发这些材料的下一代高附加值应用具有重要的必要性。这项研究的目标是开发基于可再生资源的高性能生物聚合物共混材料，在纳米和微米尺度上具有全新的相结构。为了形成三重和四重渗流现象，将研究完全湿的三元、四元和五元混合物。这种结构具有产生高性能机械性能和降低导电性能渗流阈值的巨大潜力。在生物聚合物/生物聚合物界面上表现出自组装液滴部分润湿的体系也将被考虑，因为它们具有使复杂的多相体系相容的独特能力，而且几乎没有被探索过。此外，还将研究固体纳米包裹体与这种异相生物聚合物共混体系的结合，目标是实现对将固体纳米包裹体定位到任何给定相中或在界面上定位所需参数的控制，并产生全新的属性集。研究了纳米夹杂物对聚结行为的影响及其对界面相互作用的影响。 这项工作的重点将放在上述体系的结构-性能关系上，特别是在导电性能和高性能冲击强度方面的潜力。三元、四元和五元生物聚合物体系的结构-性质关系在科学文献中几乎没有开发过。

Although the use of biopolymers in the plastics industry has seen dramatic growth in the last decade, there is an important need to develop next generation high value-added applications for these materials. The goal of the proposed research is to develop high performance biopolymer blend materials based on renewable resources with entirely novel phase structures at the nano and micro scale. Completely wet ternary, quaternary and quinary blends will be examined in order to develop triple and quadruple percolation phenomena. Such structures have significant potential to generate high performance mechanical properties and also to reduce conductive property percolation thresholds. Systems exhibiting partial wetting with self-assembled droplets at a biopolymer/biopolymer interface will also be considered as they have the unique capacity to compatibilize complex multiple phase systems and have been virtually unexplored. In addition, the combination of solid nano-inclusions with such heterophase biopolymer blend systems will be studied and the goal will be to achieve control of the parameters required to localize the solid nano-inclusion into any given phase, or at the interface, and to generate entirely new property sets. The influence of the nano-inclusion on coalescence behavior and its effect on interfacial interactions will also be studied. An emphasis in this work will be placed on the structure-property relationships of the above systems and particularly on the potential for both conductive properties and high performance impact strength. Structure-property relationships for ternary, quaternary and quinary biopolymer systems are virtually undeveloped in the scientific literature.