Highly Hydrophobic Organosilane-Functionalized Cellulose: A Promising Filler for Thermoplastic Composites.

Pavel Cerny,Petr Bartos,Pavel Kriz,Pavel Olsan,Petr Spatenka

doi:10.3390/ma14082005

Abstract

The aim of this work is to design and optimize the process of functionalization of cellulose fibers by organosilane functional groups using low-pressure microwave plasma discharge with hexamethyldisiloxane (HMDSO) precursor in order to prepare a compatible hydrophobic filler for composites with nonpolar thermoplastic matrices. Particular attention was paid to the study of agglomeration of cellulose fibers in the mixture with polypropylene. In our contribution, the dependence of the surface wettability on used process gas and treatment time was investigated. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses were applied to characterize the surface morphology and chemical composition of the cellulose fibers. It was observed that the plasma treatment in oxygen process gas led to the functionalization of cellulose fibers by organosilane functional groups without degradation. In addition, the treated cellulose was highly hydrophobic with water contact angle up to 143°. The use of treated cellulose allowed to obtain a homogeneous mixture with polypropylene powder due to the significantly lower tendency of the functionalized cellulose fibers to agglomerate.

Highlights

Published: 16 April 2021Nowadays, environmental consciousness involving problems such as increasing emissions of harmful gases during incineration and increasing consumption of petroleum resources is growing
In the first stage of our research, we studied the influence of process gas with HMDSO
Whereas the samples treated in argon have almost the same wettability as the zero sample, samples treated in air and oxygen show clear dependence of both initial water contact angle measurements (WCA) and duration of droplet absorption on the treatment time

Summary

Introduction

Published: 16 April 2021Nowadays, environmental consciousness involving problems such as increasing emissions of harmful gases during incineration and increasing consumption of petroleum resources is growing. Economic and environmental expectations of our society lead to widespread attention of engineers and scientists to the development of natural fiber reinforced polymer composites (NFPCs) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. NFPCs have been considered a promising composite materials for the last few decades with applications in many different fields of industry due to their outstanding performances in biodegradability, being lightweight, low cost, and having preferable mechanical properties [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. Different types of NFPCs are used in various applications in the automotive industry by many automotive companies such as Audi Group, BMW, Daimler. NFPCs are used for the production of bicycle frames, decking, door panels, furniture, food packaging, railroad sleepers, and window frames [21,22,23,24,25]

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