Abstract
Most polymers exhibit high flammability and poor degradability, which restrict their applications and causes serious environmental problem like “white pollution.” Thus, titanate nanotubes (TNTs) were adopted to decorate graphene oxide (GO) by a facile solution method to afford TNTs/GO nanocomposites with potential in improving the flame retardancy and photodegradability of flexible polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Results show that the as-prepared TNTs/GO can effectively improve the thermal stability and flame retardancy than TNTs and GO, especially, the peak heat release rate and total heat release were reduced by 20 and 29% with only 2.5 wt.% loading. And more, the TNTs/GO also improve the photodegradability of PVC compared with the neat PVC. The reasons can be attributed to synergistic flame-retardant and photocatalytic effects between TNTs and GO. The present research could contribute to paving a feasible pathway to constructing polymer-matrix composites with desired flame retardancy and photodegradability, thereby adding to the elimination of white pollution caused by polymers.
Highlights
Polymer-based materials are widely used in our daily lives and many industrial fields, due to their good properties such as low weight to strength ratio, relatively low cost, and good physical and chemical stability
The titanate nanotubes (TNTs)/graphene oxide (GO) nanocomposites exhibit no signals of any other phase of GO, which is possibly because TNTs are inserted into the GO layers to cause enhanced exfoliation of GO [33]
These X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) data demonstrate that the attachment of TNTs to the GO nanosheets contributes to preventing the aggregation and restacking of the assynthesized GO
Summary
Polymer-based materials are widely used in our daily lives and many industrial fields, due to their good properties such as low weight to strength ratio, relatively low cost, and good physical and chemical stability. Most polymers are flammable and could cause potential hazard to human’s life and property, owing to their organic nature [1,2,3,4] In the meantime, they usually exhibit chemical inertness and non-biodegradability, thereby producing severe white pollution to contaminate soil and water [5,6,7,8]. They usually exhibit chemical inertness and non-biodegradability, thereby producing severe white pollution to contaminate soil and water [5,6,7,8] To deal with these issues, many researchers have made efforts to construct novel flame retardants in order to improve the flame retardancy and reduce the waste pollution of polymers. It has been found that the introduction of nano-fillers is effective in improving the flame retardancy of polymer
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