C60 as fine fillers to improve poly(phenylene sulfide) electrical conductivity and mechanical property

Maliang Zhang,Yali Bai,Bowen Cheng,Xiaotian Wang,Zhenhuan Li

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-04491-1

Abstract

Electrical conductive poly(phenylene sulfide) (PPS)/fullerene (C60) composites were prepared by 1-chlornaphthalene blending method, and the interface effects of C60 and PPS on PPS/C60 properties were characterized. C60 is an excellent nanofiller for PPS, and 2 wt% PPS/C60 composite displayed the optimal conductivity which achieved 1.67 × 10−2 S/cm. However, when C60 concentration reached 2 wt%, the breaking strength and tensile modulus of PPS/C60 fiber achieved maximum 290 MPa and 605 MPa, and those values were 7.72 and 11.2 times as that of pure PPS. The excellent conductive and mechanical properties of PPS/C60 were attributed to the heterogeneous nucleation of C60 during PPS crystallization, formation of a large number of covalent bond by main C60-thiol adducts and minor C60-ArCl alkylation between C60 outer surface and PPS matrix. At same time, PPS/C60 thermal properties were also investigated.

Highlights

Fullerene/polymer composites have recently attracted considerable attention from the materials research community[1,2,3]
Chemical functionalization of fullerenes is often performed to increase the miscibility of fullerenes with host polymers[6], but the chemical functionalization method makes fullerenes lost certain original precious properties, which resulted in chemical attachment of fullerenes to a polymer is not always the most effective method for getting high performance composite materials, despite a number of fullerene-attached polymers have been successfully synthesized in the past[7]
The conventional fillers included single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs)[11, 12], inorganic fullerene-like tungsten disulfide (IF-WS2)[13], SWCNT-IF-WS214–16, functionalized SWCNTs and MWCNTs17–20, nano particles of TiO2, ZnO, CuO and SiC21, nanoscale alumina particles[22], graphite[23], glass fiber[24], metal inorganic salt[25], nano-SiOx26, carbon and fiber[27] et al it has been recently shown that the properties of PPS based composites hardly increase at low nanofiller loadings[14, 28, 29]

Summary

Introduction

Fullerene/polymer composites have recently attracted considerable attention from the materials research community[1,2,3]. C60 was selected as fillers to improve PPS electrical conductivity and mechanical property, and the influence of the 1-chloronaphthalene solution mixing method and subsequent melt process on filler dispersion, C60 interfacial adhesion with PPS matrix and composite properties were investigated to correlate the microscopic structure with macroscopic properties.

Results

Conclusion