Effect of Nanofiller on the Gas Permeability of Epoxy Nanocomposite

Abstract

There is an increasing demand of advanced materials with better property to meet new requirements of the present time and nanocomposite is such a material. It has better surface area per unit volume and high aspect ratio. So the reinforcing efficiency is greater than any other conventional polymer film. In recent times the barrier property of the nanocomposite has drawn a significant amount of interest. The conventional nanofiller that is used to achieve high barrier property is clay. Because apart from good barrier property clay also posses high mechanical and thermal property. With higher percentage of clay the barrier property improves, however the improvement in the mechanical property diminishes. This brings the concept of using an alternative nanofiller polyhedral oligomeric silsiquioxane to decrease permeability of nanocomposite. POSS is a unique material having both inorganic and organic part and having better property as nanocomposite. The aim of this study is to compare the permeability of two differnt epoxy system with POSS and clay respectively. Epoxy is a general used resin system for most of the nanocomposite due to their higher crosslinking ability. The permeability was measured using a gas permeability setup and acquired data from this system was analyzed. Result showed that the permeability of a nanocomposite is mainly dependent on the interaction of the resin and filler instead of filler itself.