Manufacturing, Multiscale Analysis on Mechanical Properties and Microstructural Characterisation of Graphene Nanoplatelet Reinforced PPS and PA6 Composites

Abstract

Graphene Nanoplatelet (GNP) is a relatively new type of nano-scale reinforcement that can be used to enhance the performance as well as tailor the properties of both engineering and high performance thermoplastic composites. With the rising interest of developing next-gen materials for aerospace, automotive and space buildings from both industrial and academic communities, extensive researches have been conducted for manufacture, characterisation and numerical simulation on various types of graphene nanoplatelet reinforced polymer nanocomposites. However, in many cases, the actual improvements on polymer nanocomposites are often much inferior to the theoretical prediction. This study aims at an in-depth understanding of relationship between the microstructures and the overall mechanical properties of GNP reinforced polyphenylene sulfide (PPS) and polyamide (PA6) thermoplastic composites. GNPs with various grades were melt mixed or solution blended with target thermoplastic resins to manufacture GNP reinforced thermoplastic composites. The GNP/PPS/PA6 composites were evaluated by multi-scale mechanical experiments. Through the combination of conventional tensile and flexural tests with non-destructive nano-indentation tests, the relationship between local mechanical response and overall material performance are built and discussed. To further investigate the mechanism of how dispersion and distribution of GNPs influence the microstructure and macro-performance of GNP/PPS/PA6 composites, reactive ion etching (RIE) was applied to aid the observation of nano-structure of samples under SEM. The agglomerations, multi-phase and interphase between GNP and surrounding polymer chains were visualised to study how the changes on microstructure dominate the properties of GNP polymer composites.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Tianjian Ji (Supervisor) & Zhenjun Yang (Supervisor)