A Highly Effective Reactive Liquid Crystal for the Improved β-Nucleation of Isotactic Polypropylene

作者：Li, Qing; Zhang, Xiaoyuan; Li, Jingfeng; Ouyang, Zhaofei; Wang, Haixia; Wei, Gang; Su, Zhiqiang^*

来源：Polymer Engineering and Science, 2014, 54(9): 2112-2120.

DOI：10.1002/pen.23760

• ISOTHERMAL CRYSTALLIZATION
• BLENDS
• AGENTS
• POLYSTYRENE
• FORM

We report here the synthesis and characterization of a reactive liquid crystal (RLC) as a novel polymeric nucleating agent for the promotion of the nucleation efficiency of isotactic polypropylene (iPP). The RLC was synthesized by an in-situ photo-polymerization and was then grafted onto the molecular chain of iPP by the reactive blending. The phase transition and crystalline morphologies of RLC-iPP in the beta-nucleation were studied. It is found that the nucleation efficiency of beta-crystals of iPP can be increased to 42% with a very small amount of RLC grafting, which is much higher than the reported nucleation efficiency of polymeric nucleating agents up to now (23%). In addition, we found that the nucleation efficiency of beta-crystals is strongly related to the concentration of RLC for the reactive blending. The nucleation efficiency was decreased from 42% to about 17% with the increase of RLC concentration from 0.5% to 4%. We propose a possible nucleation mechanism for this interesting phenomenon. It is expected that this new beta-nucleation RLC will have potential industrial applications in the future.

• 出版日期2014-9
• 单位北京化工大学