| Abstract: | The properties of nanostructured plastics are determined by complex relationships between the type and size of the nanoreinforcement, the interface and chemical interaction between the nanoreinforcement and the polymeric chain, along with macroscopic processing and microstructural effects. In this article, we investigated the thermal and viscoelastic property enhancement on crosslinked epoxy using two types of nanoreinforcement, namely, organoion exchange clay and polymerizable polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) macromers. Glass transitions of these nanocomposites were studied using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Small-strain stress relaxation under uniaxial deformation was examined to provide insights into the time-dependent viscoelastic behavior of these nanocomposites. Since the size of the POSS macromer is comparable to the distance between molecular junctions, as we increase the amount of POSS macromers, the glass transition temperature Tg as observed by DSC, increases. However, for an epoxy network reinforced with clay, we did not observe any effect on the Tg due to the presence of clay reinforcements. In small-strain stress relaxation experiments, both types of reinforcement provided some enhancement in creep resistance, namely, the characteristic relaxation time, as determined using a stretched exponential relaxation function increased with the addition of reinforcements. However, due to different reinforcement mechanisms, enhancement in the instantaneous modulus was observed for clay-reinforced epoxies, while the instantaneous modulus was not effected in POSS–epoxy nanocomposites. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 73: 1993–2001, 1999 |
