CORRELATION BETWEEN MORPHOLOGY, DEFORMATION BEHAVIOR AND FILLER DIMENSIONALITY OF POLYOLEFIN ELASTOMER BASED NANOCOMPOSITES

Abstract

This research has been aimed at designing nanocomposites of elastomeric ethylene/1-octene copolymer (EOC) with inclusion of nanofillers of different dimensionalities so as to investigate filler dimensionalities on morphology, deformation behavior, and thermal properties. The research has also been focused over determining the correlation between morphology and deformation behavior of the material. Besides, synthesizing the ionomer nanocomposite of EOC by chemical modification is also the secondary objectives. An elastomeric ethylene/1-octene copolymer (EOC) is blended with three different kinds of nanofillers by melt blending at 90 °C. The fillers used are multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT), layered silicate (LS) and boehmite, which represent 1D, 2D and 3D nanoparticles, respectively. Subsequently, the materials are characterized by different methods such as Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), tensile test, microhardness measurement, hysteresis measurement, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).