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Applied Clay Science 2017 Accepted Manuscript.pdf (1.42 MB)

Tortuosity model to predict the combined effects of crystallinity and nano-sized clay mineral on the water vapour barrier properties of polylactic acid

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-04-28, 10:16 authored by Bowen Tan, Noreen Thomas
The combined effects of crystallinity and nano-sized clay mineral (montmorillonite) fillers on the water vapour barrier properties of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) nanocomposites are investigated. Both amorphous and semi-crystalline PLA nanocomposites containing 0 to 5 wt% montmorillonite clay are prepared by melt compounding followed by compression moulding with two different thermal treatments: quenching and annealing. Thermal properties and morphology are investigated using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), polarised light microscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and wide-angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD). It is confirmed that the nanocomposite structures are intercalated and the montmorillonite aspect ratio is measured to be 40 in both quenched and annealed samples. Water vapour transmission rates (WVTR) through the film samples are measured. A new tortuous path model is developed that fits the WVTR data and accounts for the effects of crystallinity as well as montmorillonite aspect ratio, concentration and orientation.

Funding

Department of Materials, Loughborough University, UK.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Materials

Published in

Applied Clay Science

Volume

141

Pages

46 - 54

Citation

TAN, B. and THOMAS, N.L., 2017. Tortuosity model to predict the combined effects of crystallinity and nano-sized clay mineral on the water vapour barrier properties of polylactic acid. Applied Clay Science, 141, pp. 46-54.

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/

Publication date

2017

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Applied Clay Science and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.clay.2017.02.014

ISSN

0169-1317

Language

  • en