Syntheses Of Functional Oligomers And Their Applications As Reactive Compatibilizer For Polyolefin/Nylon 66 Blends

Polypropylene(PP) and polyethelene(PE) are two kinds of useful polymers, but they also have many disadvantages, which limit their applications severely. Blending them with PA66 is a common method to overcome their disadvantages. However, polyolefins have no thermodynamic miscibility with Nylon66 (PA66) because the former are non-polar polymers, while the latter is a strong polar polymer. The functionalized polyolefins with reactive groups have been used extensively as in-situ compatibilizer in polymer blends. Such a functionalization is usually carried out by grafting polymerization of functional monomers onto the substrate in melt state with organic peroxides as initiator. However, this method has some obvious limitations as follows: uncontrollable reactivity; undesirable side reactions; residual monomer and initiator; the complicated reaction system and environment-unfriendly processing, and so on.In this paper, we report on a new, viable strategy for the preparation of polymer blends without either peroxide initiator or monomer and the strategy is based on the depolymerizing performance of theα-methyl styrene (AMS) oligomer. We investigated further into the application of the oligomer in the blends of PP/PA66 and PE/PA66 as compatibilizer.Oligomers (PAG) consisting of AMS and GMA with an epoxy group were synthesized with different monomer feed ratios. When the oligomer was added to a blend of PP/ PA66 or PE/PA66, in situ compatibilization obviously occurred and a remarkably compatibilized polymer blend was obtained, according to the molua test and the SEM images of the resulting blends. DSC results revealed that interactions took place between the blend polymers when compatibilizer PAG was adding into the system. Moreover, the mechanical properties of the blends were enhanced with an appropriate content of PAG.