[CCoE Notice] MS Thesis Presentation

[Abercrombie, Irene F]

MS Thesis Defense

Development of poly(lactic acid) blended with layered silicates


Yoo Rang Heo

Date: Friday, April 26th, 2013

Location: Mechanical Engineering Small Conference Room
Time: 2:00 pm


Committee Chair:
Dr. Ramanan Krishnamoorti


Layered silicates are used for organic/inorganic hybrid fillers to reinforce the polymers. Dispersion of polymer and layered silicate is important because phase separation leads to weak interaction which makes poor property at polymer-layered silicate nanocomposites.

In this work, PLA(Poly-lactic acid) is synthesized from cyclic L-Lactide with layered silicates through  in-situ ring opening reaction with varying concentration of layered silicate. PLA is an attractive biomaterial and  used for packaging due to high strength, high-modulus properties. Its shortcomings such as barrier property, brittleness could be enhanced by mixing with organic modified layered silicate.  The polymer-layered silicate nanocomposites are characterized by x-ray diffraction, thermal gravimetric analysis, gel permeation chromatography, and optical microscopy. In this work, intercalated or exfoliated polymer layered silicate nanocomposites could be achieved.  The analysis of samples shows that thermal stability is enhanced with well dispersed layered silicates in PLA and molecular weight, crystallinity, morphology depend on dispersibility and concentration.


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