Abstract
Reactive blending is a promising approach for the sustainable development of bio-based polymer blends and composites, which currently is gaining more and more attention. In this paper, biodegradable blends based on poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) and poly(lactic acid) (PLA) were prepared via reactive blending performed in an internal mixer. The PCL and PLA content varied in a ratio of 70/30 and 55/45. Reactive modification of PCL/PLA via liquid organic peroxides (OP) including 0.5 wt.% of tert-butyl cumyl peroxide (BU), 2,5-dimethyl-2,5-di-(tert-butylperoxy)-hexane (HX), and tert-butyl peroxybenzoate (PB) is reported. The materials were characterized by rotational rheometer, atomic force microscopy (AFM), thermogravimetry (TGA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), tensile tests and biodegradability tests. It was found that the application of peroxides improves the miscibility between PCL and PLA resulted in enhanced mechanical properties and more uniform morphology. Moreover, it was observed that the biodegradation rate of PCL/PLA blends reactively compatibilized was lower comparing to unmodified samples and strongly dependent on the blend ratio and peroxide structure. The presented results confirmed that reactive blending supported by organic peroxide is a promising approach for tailoring novel biodegradable polymeric systems with controllable biodegradation rates.
Highlights
Developed biodegradable aliphatic polyesters, which are still a main focus of academic and industrial research, include both petroleum-based thermoplastics such as poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL), poly(butyrate succinate) (PBS) and poly(glycolic acid)(PGA), as well as polymers of renewable origins such as poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA)
The decomposition of the organic peroxides gives primary radicals that can be a source for secondary alkyl or aryl, which are formed by β-scission of primary radicals
According to the results obtained, blending PCL with higher content of PLA caused a decrease in thermal properties of the blend with little to no impact on the mechanical properties
Summary
(PGA), as well as polymers of renewable origins such as poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA). These materials are continuously popular over the past years due to their potentially hydrolyzable ester bonds, which makes them dominant in the role of biodegradable plastics [1,2,3,4]. Poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) is a synthetic biodegradable aliphatic polyester obtained via ring-opening polymerization of ε-caprolactone [5,6]. The low melting point of PCL makes the material compostable as a rendering medium due to the temperatures obtained during composting routinely exceeding 60 ◦ C [12,13,14]
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