As part of a large government funded project, we are investigating ways to improve plastic recycling. A key theme in the project, focuses on the plasma treatment of polymers and its role in enhancing the miscibility of various polymer blends, thereby improving mechanical properties. Polyethylene(PE) and polypropylene(PP) can easily be recycled, but both of these or often contaminated, i.e. some PP present in PE and vice versa. Most polymer blends are highly immiscible and require modification to obtain sufficient mechanical properties, i.e. contaminated PP or PE will have poor mechanical properties. Grafting a functional group onto the polymer that can interact with both polymers acts as a bridge, like a surfactant, to make an immiscible blend compatible. Plasma treatment, like corona discharge, is an energy efficient way to graft functional groups onto a polymer. However, this technique is exclusively used as a surface modification technique because of the low penetration depth of a plasma. This project aims to develop a method to use plasma treatment directly onto a polymer melt while it is being processed. This way the bulk of the polymer can be modified, making it suitable for polymer blending. However, the efficiency of this process is greatly unknow.
Undergraduate
Participants will be expected to use plasma treatment to produce blends of polypropylene and polyethylene under different treatment conditions and to use suitable characterization techniques to assess the efficiency of the modification process.
None
No lab has been assigned to this project