Preparation And Characterization Of Nylon 6/Layered Silicate Composites

In this paper, the Pan-mill Equipment was employed to prepare PA6/MMT and PA6/VMT composites. The exfoliation of the layered silicates was realized by the equipment based on its unique functions: strong pulverizing, shearing, milling and mixing. The morphology and dispersion of the layered silicates in polymer matrix were investigated and the structure and properties of the composites were characterized. The Solid State Shear Milling (S-3M) method was applied for preparing engineering plastic/layered silicates nanocomposites, which made the method to be more applicable.MMT was partially exfoliated by milling the mixture of nylon 6 and MMT. The XRD showed that the characteristic peak of MMT disappeared after milling and the TEM photos revealed that most layered silicates were at nanometer scale and dispersed evenly in the polymer matrix, meanwhile, the Molau experiment manifested that there was a strong interfacial interaction between the MMT and the polymer matrix. Nylon 6/ MMT composites prepared by S-3M method exhibited excellent mechanical and thermal stability properties. Comparing with nylon 6, the tensile strength was enhanced by -23% from 63.6MPa to 77.8MPa and that of composite prepared by conventional method (ME) was just 69.3MPa. The introduction of MMT improved the thermal stability of the materials and the onset decomposition temperature and peak decomposition temperature of the composites were increased by 28 ℃ and 41 ℃ respectively. The analysis of nonisothermal...