Abstract
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is widely utilized in material science, chemical engineering, and environmental science due to its excellent properties. By utilizing fillers, so-called composite materials can be obtained with enhanced mechanical, wettability, or thermal conductivity performance. Here, we present a simple, cost-effective approach to vary either the mechanical properties (Young’s modulus) or surface wettability of bulk PDMS and PDMS sponges simply by adding nanodiamond filler with different surface terminations, either oxidized (oND) or hydrogenated (reduced, rND) nanodiamond. Minuscule amounts of oxidized nanodiamond particles as filler showed to benefit the compressive Young’s modulus of composite sponges with up to a 52% increase in its value, while the wettability of composite sponges was unaffected. In contrast, adding reduced nanodiamond particles to PDMS yielded inclined water contact angles on the PDMS/nanodiamond composite sponges. Finally, we show that the PDMS/rND composites are readily utilized as an absorbent for oil/water separation problems. This signifies that the surface termination of the ND particle has a crucial effect on the performance of the composite.
Highlights
In science and industrial applications, polymer nanocomposites have received increasing attention over the last several years
We show that the surface termination of the ND particles is of pivotal importance for the effect on bulk PDMS and its porous structures
ND particles feature an extreme surface-to-volume ratio [33] and the properties in materials and their reactivity are strongly dependent on the surface termination of the ND particles
Summary
In science and industrial applications, polymer nanocomposites have received increasing attention over the last several years. This can be related to the remarkable improvements offered by the incorporation of nano-sized fillers, such as fullerenes [1], carbon nanotubes [2,3,4], nanodiamond (ND) [5,6], inorganic nanoparticles [7], and graphene sheets [8,9,10]. Improvements to material properties often include improvements to the mechanical [11], thermal [11,12], and barrier properties [13,14,15] of the nanocomposite Most of these fillers, are expensive, and surface functionalization has to be executed prior to their usage. For PDMS sponges, the important parameters are the fatigue resistance, mechanical properties, wettability, pore size, porosity, and pore interconnectivity
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