Flexible Composite Materials — Between Inorganic Fibers and Organic Polymers

Abstract

In order to develop a flexible composite material that could play a good cushion role for high temperature ceramic membrane cleaning, we herein report a flexible composite material which could achieve effective buffering to relieve the stress generated by rigid contact and play a certain sealing effect. The coating method is applied to fabricate the composite material, which can be produced by multi-layer superposition using high silica fiber fabric and waterborne polyurethane. The results show that waterborne polyurethane (WPU) as a binder coating plays a key role in improving the strength by six times compared to raw materials and maintaining the elasticity of materials. Meanwhile, the thermal degradation mechanism of the composites calcined at different temperatures (700–1200 °C) in air atmosphere is investigated. The as-made composite materials still have good flexibility, and the tensile strength is about 2.4 MPa after calcination at 1000 °C for 80 h. This provides a method to prepare flexible cushion composite materials for ceramic membrane filtration.