Controlled Wetting and Nanostructuring in Multiple Phase Biopolymers

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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.