EXPERIENCES
Winter Intern
R&D Department Materials Science Center
Department of Metallurgical & Materials Engineering
Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology
Nagpur (Maharashtra-India)
December 2013- January 2014 ( 6 weeks)
Project Title : Study the effect of talc addition on the nucleation properties of Polypropylene.
Project Guide : Dr. D.R. Peshwe, Dr. K.N. Pande
Project Summary :
Polypropylene is a thermoplastic polymer with innumerable applications including as a structural plastic or as a fiber-type plastic. Despite widespread applications, Polypropylene suffers from major drawbacks like difficulty to paint, vulnerable to corrosion, flammability and high thermal expansion. Hence we need to inculcate nucleation with talc in order to improve these properties. Recent research has generated advances in polypropylene nanocomposites that are sufficient to motivate new technological applications. For example, PP-based nanocomposites have been developed for application as exterior automotive components, Cone calorimetric measurements of peak heat release rate from maleated/ PP nanocomposites with 4% loading are reduced by 75% relative to the pure polymer. As a result of talc addition as a nucleating agent nucleation efficiency and degree of crystallinity increases, density of nuclei increases and a significant increase in the starting crystallization temperature of PP is observed. In order to enhance polymers with nanofillers and produce nanocomposites the solution method is employed in which the fillers are added to a polymer solution using solvents such as toluene, xylene, chloroform and acetonitrile to integrate the polymer and filler molecules. Post nucleating agent addition, X-ray diffraction (XRD), FTIR and SEM were used to characterize the PP macromolecular orientation of PP pressed films, to analyze the properties of composites that were expected increased. PP crystallization observations with and without talc were carried out to characterize macromolecular modifications and to localize PP nucleation on particle surface and conclusions drawn.