Research On Tribological Behavior Of Polypropylene/Montmorillonite Nanocomposites

In this paper, referring to two kinds of MMT, the PP/MMT composites were synthesized through melt intercalation in twin-screw extruder. The mechanical properties and tribological properties in dry sliding condition were investigated. By using FEA software ANSYS, the tribological properties of composites was analyzed.XRD, FTIR, and TEM were employed to determine the structure of the composites. These solution indicate that composites containing <3wt% MMT is nanocomposites.Mechanical properties research shows that, the addition of MMT can improve the elastic modulus and impact strength, and the addition of MMT with low content can improve the hardness and tensile strength which decrease with the further addition of MMT.The friction and wear behavior sliding against GCr15 steel was examined on M-2000 text rig in a ring-on-block configuration. Under dry sliding,<3wt% MMT can lessen adhesive wear and plastic zone formation of PP matrix, wear mass loss is reduced to 30%~40%, compared with that of bare PP. Compared with MMT of KH-V6 and TJ-2 types, TJ-2 type MMT improves the tribological properties of PP more effectively. The micro- topographic of rubbing surface was analyzed by the SEM, This results of experiment indicate, with the increasing content of MMT in the system (<3wt%), the wear mechanism of the composites vary from adhesion wear to grinding wear; the wear mechanism of the composites(≥wt4%) is fatigue wear respectively.Based on the work above, the strain-field and stress-field of composites were gained at friction load by using ANSYS. The results of the simulate show that, the transfer film is prompted to be formed by the addition of MMT (<3wt%).while the addition of MMT (≥4% ),agglomeration of nano-particle is disadvantageous to the formation of Uniform Stabilized transfer film.