Santiranjan Shannigrahi
Institute of Materials Reserach and Engineering, Singapore
Title: Polymer-ceramic composite film fabrication and characterization for harsh environment applications
Biography
Biography: Santiranjan Shannigrahi
Abstract
Polymer-ceramic composites are gaining importance due to their high specific strength, corrosion resistance, and high mechanical properties as well as low cost. As a result Polymer composites are suitable for various industrial applications, like automobiles, aerospace and biomedical areas. The present works comprises development of polymer/ceramic composite films and are tested for harsh environment including weatherability and UV barrier properties. The polymer composite films are kept in weather chamber for a fixed period of time followed by tested for their physical, mechanical and chemical properties. The composites films are fabricated using compounding followed by hot pressing. UV visible spectroscopy results reveal that the pure polymer polyethylene (PE) films are transparent in the visible range and do not absorb UV. However, polymer ceramic composite films start absorbing UV completely even at very low filler loading amount of 5 wt.%. The changes in tensile properties of the various composite films before and after UV illuminations for 40 hrs and at 60ï‚°C. The tensile strength of neat PE film has been observed 8% reduction, whereas the remarkable increase in tensile strength has been observed (18% improvement for 10 wt. % filled composites films). The UV exposure leads to strengthen the crosslinking among PE polymer chains in the filled composite films, which contributes towards the incremented tensile strength properties.