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Abstract
In this work, polypropylene (PP) nanocomposites containing different weight concentration of graphene nanoplatelets (GNP) were prepared by melt-mixing using an industrial-scale, co-rotating, intermeshing, twin-screw extruder. The materials were then compression moulded into sheets, and biaxially stretched at different stretching ratios (SRs) below the PP melting temperature. The effects of GNP content and biaxial stretching on the bulk properties of unfilled PP and PP/GNP nanocomposites have been investigated in details. Results show that the addition of GNP (>5wt%) can lead to electrically conductive composites due to the formation of percolation network. The GNP have led to increased polymer crystallinity and enhanced materials stiffness and strength. Biaxial stretching process further enhances the materials mechanical properties but has slightly decreased the composites electrical conductivity. The PP/GNP nanocomposites were also processed into 3D demonstrator parts using vacuum forming, and the properties of which were comparable with biaxially stretched composites.
Highlights
Graphene possesses exceptional mechanical properties, excellent thermal/electrical conductivity as well as large specific surface area
The melting and crystallization behavior of unfilled PP and PP/ graphene nanoplatelets (GNP) composites were obtained based on the Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) data
The presence of GNP is known to accelerate the PP crystallization kinetics (Beuguel et al, 2018), where GNP may serve as a nucleation site and PP chains may grow epitaxial on GNP (Jun et al, 2018)
Summary
Graphene possesses exceptional mechanical properties, excellent thermal/electrical conductivity as well as large specific surface area. Past literatures suggest the electrical conductivity and mechanical properties of polymers can be greatly enhanced by the addition of GNP due to its high electrical conductivity and excellent mechanical properties (modulus 1 TPa for graphene (Mayoral et al, 2015). GNP have been used to reinforce a range of polymers such as polyethylene (Noorunnisa et al, 2016b), polyethylene terephthalate (Zhang et al, 2010), polycarbonate (King et al, 2011), thermoplastic polyurethane (Yuan et al, 2017), polyether ether ketone (He et al, 2020; Zhu et al, 2021) and polyamide (Mayoral et al, 2015), etc, to obtain various nanocomposites with enhanced thermal, mechanical and electrical properties.
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