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Toward supertough and heat-resistant binary blend: polyoxymethylene/elastomer via in-situ graft copolymer formation during one-pot reactive melt blending

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Abstract

Polyoxymethylene (POM) qualifies as a best comprehensive performance engineering plastics used abundantly in many fields. Treatment by blending with elastomer so far has became the most important way to improve the toughness of POM to meet the demand of specific engineering design. Unfortunately, a prominent toughening efficiency fails to reach if POM blends contain low levels of elastomer, and the degradation temperature of those blends shows a frequently downward trend after the hybridization. Herein, we report a reactive extrusion processing for elastomer toughened POM in the absence of any other compatibilizer securing both advantages of excellent toughness and thermal stability. Blends were prepared by a one-pot melt-blending method from POM and Ethylene–acrylic ester-glycidyl methacrylate random copolymer (E-MA-GMA). During the above process, the end-blocking reaction of unstable POM hydroxyls occurred in the blend systems. The maximum elongation break at room temperature of the POM/E-MA-GMA (90/10) blend reached 94.5% with higher toughening efficiency over previous literature. Synchronously, the value of maximum mass loss temperature (Tmax) for the 90/10 (POM/E-MA-GMA) blend was 77.3 °C higher than that of pure POM. The high toughness and thermal stability of the POM/E-MA-GMA blend demonstrates the advantage of melt graft polymerization, which improves the interfacial compatibility of the blend and stabilizes the hydroxyl group of POM. This work presents a strategy for synchronously toughening and thermal stabilizing POM by constructing a simple binary reactive blending system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of High-Efficiency Utilization of Coal and Green Chemical Engineering, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Ningxia University, Yinchuan, 750021, China

    Aijuan Sun & Faliang Luo

  2. State Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering, Polymer Research Institute of Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, Sichuan, China

    Rong Chen & Shaoyun Guo

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Tien-Mo Shih

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  1. Aijuan Sun
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Correspondence to Aijuan Sun.

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Sun, A., Luo, F., Chen, R. et al. Toward supertough and heat-resistant binary blend: polyoxymethylene/elastomer via in-situ graft copolymer formation during one-pot reactive melt blending. J Polym Res 30, 101 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10965-023-03481-4

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