| To make plastics antistatic and semiconductive, it is convetional to add metallic fillers. Conductive plastics have many applications like cable shielding, controlled-release medicine systems, nonlinear optics, smart aircraft skins and biosensors. For some applications such as oxygen tents in hospitals, night lights, aerospace glazing and antistatic transparent films, it would be very desirable to combine transparency with electrical conductivity. The objective of this work was aimed at the development of conductive and transparent vinyl plastics, specifically polyvinyl chloride (PVC), formulated with a plasticizer, stabilizer and purposely added quaternary ammonium compound as an ionic conductor.;It was found that the electrical conductivity increased with increase in plasticizer and quaternary salt content. The electrical conductivity and transparency of the polyvinyl chloride also depended upon the solubilty of the ionic material in the plasticizer. Transparency increased with plasticizer content and decreased with increasing quaternary salt content. Plasticizer content around 50-75 PHR salt content between 0-1.0 PHR gave reasonably good transparency and electrical conductivity. |
