Abstract
The literature relatively lacks results and data related to the direct influence of physical aging on the properties of polypropylene and natural rubber blend; so, the objective of this research was to study the influence of thermal and ultraviolet (UV) aging on a natural rubber (NR) SMR-ω and polypropylene (PP) blend. This toughened blend is generally used for the fabrication of automobile parts and in the construction industry. The loading of the NR was 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 wt%. The blends were prepared by calendering followed by melt extrusion and it was subjected to XRD (WAXS) analysis, mechanical testing, thermal and UV aging, and optical microscopy (OM) observations. The results obtained by X-ray characterisation show that the adding of this kind of rubber does not affect the crystalline structure of the polypropylene matrix. Moreover, the adding of the rubber shows a decrease of the obtained material tensile strength and a valuable increase of the elongation at break. The shore A hardness decreases slightly as the percentage of the natural rubber increases. The optical microscopy indicates the apparition of cracks at the sample surfaces and debonded rubber domains from polypropylene matrix induced by UV and thermal aging.
Highlights
The mixing of various kinds of polymers is a suitable method for the development of blends with characteristics better to those of the individual components
The aim of this research is to study the influence of UV and thermal aging on the mechanical properties of polypropylene and natural rubber blend
For samples containing 10–50 wt% of natural rubber, represented, respectively, by Fig. 1b–e, we can observe that the four diffraction peaks remain unchanged, especially the β phase characteristics peak located at 16.28°
Summary
The mixing of various kinds of polymers is a suitable method for the development of blends with characteristics better to those of the individual components. The resulted binary blend of polypropylene (PP) and rubber component is called a thermoplastic elastomer (TPE). Thermoplastic elastomeric materials (TPEs) can be obtained from a blend of PP and various natural or synthetic types of rubbers. This kind of blend has the characteristics combination of thermoplastic and elastomeric phases [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] and it can be treated like thermoplastic materials.
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