Compounding PPS and PPSU
Compounding PPS with PPSU to improve toughness and thermal stability of PPS.
Description
This paper was produced as the final deliverable for the plastics and composites engineering PCE 431 course, Advanced Materials and Processing. This paper was written in SAMPE format, with a purpose of presenting the findings of our quarter-long research project, which was compounding and characterizing novel blends of PPS and PPSU thermoplastic.
Abstract
The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) is one of the most well-recognized institutions for polymer science and engineering research. Lina Ghanbari, a USM graduate student and WWU PCE program alumni, is interested in polymer additives that can improve polyphenylene sulfide's (PPS) thermal and mechanical properties and qualify its use for urban air mobility applications. It is known that PPS has a low melt viscosity and can be difficult to process and coupling this with the fact that there was limited material to work with, careful planning was done to ensure each experiment was optimized and material waste was minimized. While PPS possesses favorable mechanical properties and chemical resistance, its brittleness and thermal stability make it poorly suited for many applications, such as primary aircraft structures. PPS shows limited solubility with other polymers partially due to its high chemical resistance and low melt viscosity. However, PPS has been shown to be partially miscible with polyphenyl sulfone (PPSU), though only for weight percentages above 30%. This project will investigate the effects of blending PPS with PPSU at smaller weight percentages (0-15%) and observe the impact on thermal stability, toughness, viscosity, and molecular structure. Precisely, this research document focuses on the extrusion of two control groups (100% PPS and 100% PPSU) and blends of PPS/PPSU of weight percentages 95/5, 90/10, and 85/15 respectively.
Collaborators
