Morphology, Thermal, Mechanical Properties and Rheological Behavior of Biodegradable Poly(butylene succinate)/poly(lactic acid) In-Situ Submicrofibrillar Composites

Abstract

In this study, biodegradable poly(butylene succinate)/poly(lactic acid) (PBS/PLA) in-situ submicrofibrillar composites with various PLA content were successfully produced by a triple-screw extruder followed by a hot stretching−cold drawing−compression molding process. This study aimed to investigate the effects of dispersed PLA submicro-fibrils on the thermal, mechanical and rheological properties of PBS/PLA composites. Morphological observations demonstrated that the PLA phases are fibrillated to submicro-fibrils in the PBS/PLA composites, and all the PLA submicro-fibrils produced seem to have a uniform diameter of about 200nm. As rheological measurements revealed, at low frequencies, the storage modulus (G’) of PBS/PLA composites has been increased by more than four orders of magnitude with the inclusion of high concentrations (15 wt % and 20 wt %) of PLA submicro-fibrils, which indicates a significant improvement in the elastic responses of PBS melt. Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) results showed that the glass transition temperature (Tg) of PBS phase slightly shifted to the higher temperature after the inclusion of PLA. DSC experiments proved that fiber morphology of PLA has obvious heterogeneous nucleation effect on the crystallization of PBS. The tensile properties of the PBS/PLA in-situ submicrofibrillar composites are also improved compared to neat PBS.

Organic acids under pressure: elastic properties, negative mechanical phenomena and pressure induced phase transitions in the lactic, maleic, succinic and citric acids

“…295,300 The characteristics and mechanical properties of many interesting polymers and materials based on, or related to, succinic acid have long been investigated. [301][302][303][304][305][306][307][308][309][310][311][312][313][314][315][316][317] 2.3.1 Crystal structure. The optimized crystal structure of succinic acid, COOH-CH-CH-COOH, is plotted in Fig.…”

Enhancing Tensile Strength and Toughness via Moderate Orientation of Amorphous Molecular Chains in Biobased Biodegradable Poly(lactic acid)

“…Several methods have been developed to improve the toughness of PLA, such as blending with polymeric elastomers − and copolymerization with flexible molecular chains . As one of the most cost-effective methods, blending with polymeric elastomers or tough polymer, such as poly­(butylene adipate- co -terephthalate) (PBAT), ,− poly­(ε-caprolactone) (PCL), ,− poly­(butylene succinate) (PBS), − poly­(propylene carbonate) (PPC), , and thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), ,, etc., has been extensively studied. For example, our previous study showed that the PLA/PBS/ethylene-methyl acrylate-glycidyl methacrylate (EGMA) (78/10/12) blend had an impact strength of up to 98 kJ/m 2 , which was almost 32 times that of neat PLA.…”

Manufacturing and compatibilization of binary blends of polyethylene and poly(bulylene succinate) by injection molding

“…These values are close to the peaks presented in Figure 6b for the different blends, the first peak (T g1 ) has moved and decreased from -114.96 °C for bioPE/ PBS blend to a value of -119.56 °C for compatibilized bioPE/PBS blend with PE-g-MA as it is indicated in Table 4, meanwhile, values in the second peak (T g2 ) show an increase from -24.86 °C for bioPE/PBS blend to -20.76 °C for samples with PE-g-MA and silanized HNTs, which indicates that the compatibilizers added can slightly hinder the mobility of bioPE/PBS blend. This behavior also indicates that there was not optimal miscibility between the two polymers (Hassan, Wei, Jiao, & Muhuo, 2013;Zhu et al, 2018).…”