PVC plastic pipes could be improved by adding nanoparticles
Valentyn Semenov / Alamy
A pinch of nanoparticles could be the solution to a problem that has long plagued plastics – how to make a material that is both strong, difficult and easy to work?
Hu-Jun Qian at the University of Jilin in China and his colleagues call this the trilemma of plastics: to make a polymer stronger, or more difficult to distort, tends to make it more fragile, or less difficult, while trying to improve these two properties both normally the more viscous material and more difficult to work.
To get around this, the researchers mixed polystyrene nanoparticles with several commonly used plastic materials. For example, they added the nanoparticles to PEMA, a polymer used to make hearing aids and artificial nails, acrylic glass used in aquariums and glasses, and PVC, which is used in construction and packaging.
The team put the resulting materials through a series of tests to see, for example, how much they could lie before breaking. In general, new materials have shown better performance than usual between different tests, sometimes considerably – they found that the PEMA was around 50% stronger when it was fortified with nanoparticles. “This offers a general design principle for new generation polymers with previously inaccessible properties of properties,” explains Qian.
To better understand why the addition of nanoparticles was so useful, the researchers also carried out computer simulations of new materials. For the case of plastics under stress, these simulations have shown that nanoparticles can move and redistribute in the material, which allows it to deform more slowly and gently instead of failing. Their ability to move was also beneficial for plastics that flow more easily when they were melted. They were therefore stronger, harder and feasible.
Qian says that his team’s approach is compatible with existing industrial processes and could be in large quantity. “This strategy could revolutionize applications requiring light, strong, difficult and easily transformable materials, such as car and aerospace composites, sustainable packaging, biomedical devices and advanced recyclable plastics,” he said.
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