A study of optical, mechanical and electrical properties of poly(methacrylic acid)/TiO2 nanocomposite

Abstract

Abstract This work is concerned with the study of the effect of titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) nanofillers on the optical, mechanical and electrical properties of poly(methacrylic acid) (PMAA) networks as a function of TiO 2 concentration and crosslink density. The structure of the prepared samples was investigated by X-ray diffractometry (XRD) and Transmittance Electron Microscope (TEM). XRD results showed a single phase for the nanocomposites indicating that no large TiO 2 aggregates in the polymer matrix. The optical properties of the prepared samples including the absorption, transmittance, energy band gap and refractive index were explored using Spectrophotometer. These measurements showed that there is a red-shift in the absorption caused by the increase of TiO 2 concentration. However, the crosslink density in the polymer plays no role in changing the absorption. The energy band gap ( E g ) decreases with increasing the concentration of TiO 2 in the polymer matrix; whereas E g increases with increasing the crosslink density. Moreover, the mechanical properties of PMAA/TiO 2 nanocomposites by Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) showed that the viscoelasticity of PMAA decreases with adding TiO 2 nanoparticles and the glass transition temperature ( T g ) was also found to drop from 130 °C to 114 °C. Finally, the DC conductivity of the obtained systems was found to increase with increasing TiO 2 nanoparticles in the matrix.