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。

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.