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Processing and characterization of bio-polyester reactive blends: From thermoplastic blends to cross-linked networks

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posted on 2017-11-23, 09:21 authored by Davide Nocita, Giuseppe Forte, Stavros Drakopoulos, Annamaria Visco, Alberto Giamporcaro, Sara Ronca
The addition of ethyl ester L-lysine tri-isocyanate (LTI) to mixtures of poly(lactide)/poly(ε-caprolactone) has been reported to improve the compatibility of the resulting blends. In the present work, we have investigated the influence of adding increasing amounts of LTI to the mechanical and thermal properties of the blends. Torque trends, plate-plate rheology, differential scanning calorimetry, scanning electron microscopy, and uniaxial tensile characterization were conducted on samples with amounts of LTI comprised between 0.5 and 5 phr. Results suggests that by increasing the content of LTI over 0.5 phr the mechanical and thermal behaviour of the blends tend to change from that of a thermoplastic to that of a cross-linked, rubber-like material with outstanding mechanical properties. Morphological investigations show a very fine, well-dispersed morphology in all cases. Numerical models have been applied to rheological experiments to identify processes and phases in the studied blends, further supporting the hypothesis of a cross-linked phase formed for blends containing more than 0.5 phr of LTI.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Materials

Published in

Polymer

Volume

132

Pages

252-263

Citation

NOCITA, D. ...et al., 2017. Processing and characterization of bio-polyester reactive blends: From thermoplastic blends to cross-linked networks. Polymer, 132, pp. 252-263.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-10-31

Publication date

2017-11-03

Copyright date

2017

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Polymer and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polymer.2017.10.069.

ISSN

0032-3861

Language

  • en

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