Controlled Wetting and Nanostructuring in Multiple Phase Biopolymers

尽管在过去十年中，生物聚合物在塑料工业中的使用出现了急剧增长，但开发这些材料的下一代高附加值应用是非常重要的。拟议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。完全湿三元，四元和五元共混物将进行检查，以开发三重和四重渗滤现象。这样的结构具有产生高性能机械特性并且还降低导电特性逾渗阈值的显著潜力。在生物聚合物/生物聚合物界面处表现出自组装液滴的部分润湿的系统也将被考虑，因为它们具有使复杂的多相系统相容的独特能力，并且几乎未被探索。此外，将研究固体纳米夹杂物与这种异相生物聚合物共混物系统的组合，目标将是实现将固体纳米夹杂物定位到任何给定相或界面处所需的参数的控制，并产生全新的属性集。纳米夹杂物的聚结行为的影响，其对界面相互作用的影响也将进行研究。 在这项工作中的重点将放在上述系统的结构-性能的关系，特别是对潜在的导电性能和高性能的冲击强度。在科学文献中，三元、四元和五元生物聚合物体系的结构-性质关系实际上尚未开发。

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.