For the preparation of advanced plastics with balance of properties, it is important to incorporate the additives or fillers into the polymer matrices. The current use of nano-fillers (at least one dimensions less than 100 nm; 1 nm = 10-9 m) push this strategy to the next level by exploiting the advantages that nanometre-size fillers offer, compared with conventional fillers, such as huge interfacial area per volume of particles, large number density of particles per particle volume, particle-particle co-relation arising at low volume fraction, etc. The nanoscale fillers-containing polymer composites are generally known as Polymer Nanocomposites (PNCs) and playing a significant role in one of the most promising twenty-first century technologies known as Nanotechnology.
The importance of PNCs comes from, over the conventional polymer composite materials, providing value-added properties not present in the neat polymer without sacrificing its inherent properties. One such PNC is clay-containing polymer nanocomposites. The incorporation of low volume percent ( 5) of surface modified nanoclay particles into the polymer matrix results in concurrent property enhancements with respect to the neat polymer matrix.
This book can provide the much needed basic information to understand and start working in this area. It also provides information about current challenges and future prospects of these types of advanced composite materials. This book is ideal for polymer and material scientists, researchers, engineers including under- and post-graduate students who are interested in this exciting field of research. It will also help industrial researchers and R&D managers who want to bring advanced polymeric material based products into the market.
provides sufficient background information for starters in this reserach areaincludes the preparation and synthesis fundamentals necessary for the preparation on the nanocomposite materialsincludes detailed characterization techniqueaddresses the environmental impact of these materialswritten by a unique author and the only book to provide a coherent approach to this class of materialsconcentrates exclusively on polymer layered silicate nanocomposites and provides an in-depth coverage