Mechanical Behavior of PMMA/SiO2 Multilayer Nanocomposites: Experiments and Molecular Dynamics Simulation

Abstract

Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA)/nano-silica (nano-SiO2) nanocom-posite film with 256 layers containing different amounts of nano-SiO2 was manufactured by a new type of micro-nano multilayer co-extrusion technology. The structure, morphology and mechanical properties of PMMA/nano-SiO2 nanocomposite films were investigated through Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and tensile test Besides, molecular dynamics simulation ^J^ was adopted to study the dispersion and content effect on mechanical properties of PMMA/nano-SiO2 nanocomposite film. It is demonstrated that the tensile strength and the elongation at break of the composites improved with increasing nano-SiO2 content from 0 to 5 wt%, which was in good agreement with the Molecular Dynamics simulation. And the nanofiller dispersion in the multilayer nanocomposite film was better than that in the single-layer film with equivalent thickness under the effect of torsion lamination. Overall, the best performance was found for the nanocomposites of PMMA with nano-SiO2 content of 3.5 wt%.