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Crystallization and melting behaviors of polypropylene admixed by graphene and β-phase nucleating agent

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Abstract

In this work, the crystallization and melting behaviors of different polypropylene (PP) materials containing a certain amount of graphene, β-phase nucleating agent (β-NA), and their mixture, respectively, were comparatively investigated. The results showed that graphene exhibited the typical sheet structure in the PP matrix, and the presence of β-NA did not change the dispersion of graphene apparently. Both graphene and β-NA exhibited great nucleating effect for the crystallization of PP. However, the nucleation efficiency of β-NA was much larger than that of graphene. With the simultaneous presence of graphene and β-NA, the crystallization ability of PP matrix was greatly improved, which indicated that there was a synergistic effect between graphene and β-NA in accelerating crystallization of PP matrix. Furthermore, it was proved that the synergistic effect was greatly dependent upon the crystallization conditions. The higher the isothermal crystallization temperature or the bigger the cooling rate, the more apparent the synergistic effect was.

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Acknowledgments

The authors express their sincere thanks to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51203129, 51173151), Distinguished Young Scholars Foundation of Sichuan (2012JQ0057), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (SWJTU12CX010, SWJTU11CX142, and SWJTU11ZT10) for the financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Advanced Technologies of Materials (Ministry of Education), School of Materials Science & Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 610031, China

    Jian Dai, Ying Shen, Jing-hui Yang, Ting Huang, Nan Zhang & Yong Wang

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  1. Jian Dai
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  2. Ying Shen
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  3. Jing-hui Yang
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  4. Ting Huang
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Correspondence to Yong Wang.

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Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

396_2013_3141_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

The supplementary materials, including the relative crystallization fraction versus crystallization time (or crystallization temperature) of different samples obtained through isothermal (or nonisothermal crystallization) processes, the variation of crystallization half time versus the isothermal crystallization temperature, and the calculation of the equilibrium melting point of different samples, can be seen from the internet. (PDF 144 kb)

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Dai, J., Shen, Y., Yang, Jh. et al. Crystallization and melting behaviors of polypropylene admixed by graphene and β-phase nucleating agent. Colloid Polym Sci 292, 923–933 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00396-013-3141-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00396-013-3141-4

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