Development of innovative polymer nanocomposite foams

随着人们对世界上有限的能源资源的需求不断增加，汽车和建筑行业迫切需要开发新的附加值更轻、机械和绝缘性能显著改善的产品。在此背景下，本项目旨在利用聚合物纳米复合材料和发泡技术来实现改善汽车和建筑行业产品的性能和/或减轻产品重量的目标。轻型汽车零部件将与全球汽车制造领先者福特加拿大公司合作进行研究。轻量化的汽车产品将减轻车辆重量，提高燃油效率。另一方面，建筑行业的绝缘产品将与SABIC Innovative Plastic Canada和Seal Air Canada合作开发，这两家公司也是塑料材料和绝缘产品的国际领先者。由于空间采暖/制冷通常约占住宅和商业总能耗的40%，因此，通过提高保温产品的保温效率将实现显著的节能。在这个项目中，我们将深入研究开发具有均匀分散的纳米结构域的纳米复合材料所需的材料组成、熔体复合技术和工艺条件。随后，将在实验室规模的泡沫挤出和泡沫注塑设备中进行广泛的发泡研究，以生产聚合物纳米复合泡沫塑料。随后，还将利用微型泡沫塑料工业应用中心(CIAMP)提供的中试塑料发泡设备进行放大实验。该项目的成功完成将使我们的行业合作伙伴能够以具有成本效益的方式制造先进的纳米复合材料产品，特别是轻质汽车零部件和建筑材料，具有优异的机械性能。

With ever-increasing demands being made on the world's limited energy resources, the automotive and construction industries urgently need to develop new value-added light-weight products with significantly improved mechanical and insulation properties. In this context, this project aims to utilize the polymer nanocomposites and foaming technologies to achieve the goal of improving the properties and/or reducing the weight of the products for the automotive and construction industries. Lightweight automotive parts will be studied in collaboration with Ford Canada, a global leader in automotive manufacturing. Lightweight automotive products will reduce vehicle weight and increase fuel efficiency. On the other hand, insulation products for construction industry will be developed in collaboration with SABIC Innovative Plastics Canada and Sealed Air Canada, who are also international leaders in plastic materials and insulation products. Since space heating/cooling typically accounts for approximately 40% of the total residential and commercial energy consumed, significant energy savings will be realized by improving the thermal insulation efficiency of thermal insulation products. In this project, we will thoroughly investigate the materials compositions, the melt compounding techniques, and the processing conditions, required to develop nanocomposites having uniformly dispersed nano-sized domains. Subsequently, extensive foaming studies will be conducted to produce polymer nanocomposite foams in lab-scale foam extrusion and foam injection-molding equipment. Following this, scaled-up experiments will also be conducted with pilot-scale plastic foaming equipment, which is available at the Centre for Industrial Applications of Microcellular Plastics (CIAMP). The successful completion of this project will enable our industry partners to manufacture advanced nanocomposite products, especially lightweight automotive parts and construction materials, with superior mechanical properties in a cost-effective manner.