Abstract
Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) is an advanced functional polymer which exhibits excellent chemical and thermal stability, and good mechanical, piezoelectric and ferroelectic properties. This work opens a new strategy for the fabrication of nanocomposites, combining the functional properties of PVDF and advanced inorganic nanomaterials. Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) has been developed for the fabrication of films containing PVDF and nanoparticles of TiO2, MnO2 and NiFe2O4. An important finding was the feasibility of EPD of electrically neutral PVDF and inorganic nanoparticles using caffeic acid (CA) and catechol violet (CV) as co-dispersants. The experiments revealed strong adsorption of CA and CV on PVDF and inorganic nanoparticles, which involved different mechanisms and facilitated particle dispersion, charging and deposition. The analysis of the deposition yield data, chemical structure of the dispersants and the microstructure and composition of the films provided an insight into the adsorption and dispersion mechanisms and the influence of deposition conditions on the deposition rate, film microstructure and composition. PVDF films provided the corrosion protection of stainless steel. Overcoming the limitations of other techniques, this investigation demonstrates a conceptually new approach for the fabrication of PVDF-NiFe2O4 films, which showed superparamagnetic properties. The approach developed in this investigation offers versatile strategies for the EPD of advanced organic-inorganic nanocomposites.
Highlights
(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) is an advanced functional polymer, which has outstanding chemical resistance, thermal stability, mechanical strength, piezoelectric and ferroelectric properties [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Many applications of Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF)–metal oxide nanocomposites involved the use of films and significant attention has been focused on the development of film deposition techniques
transmission electron microscopy (TEM) investigations showed that as-received PVDF particles were of spherical shape with a diameter of about 200 nm (Figure S1A,B)
Summary
(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) is an advanced functional polymer, which has outstanding chemical resistance, thermal stability, mechanical strength, piezoelectric and ferroelectric properties [1,2,3,4,5,6]. In our investigation we addressed this problem using a biomimetic strategy, which is based on the use of catecholate-type molecules as dispersants The goal of this investigation was the fabrication of PVDF–metal oxide films by EPD using chelating catecholate molecules as co-dispersants for PVDF and metal oxide nanoparticles. Due to significant interest in the fabrication of PVDF composites containing MnO2, TiO2 and NiFe2O4 nanoparticles, we selected such nanomaterials as model metal oxides of different types for the feasibility studies, which showed the versatility of our approach. The investigations of deposition efficiency provided an insight into the influence of the chemical structure of the dispersant molecules and charged groups on their adsorption on PVDF and metal oxide nanoparticles and related adsorption mechanisms. Following the work objective we investigated the microstructure, composition, and properties of the films deposited at different conditions
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