3RD INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON TECHNOLOGY - ENGINEERING & SCIENCE - Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia (2017-02-09)

Estimation Of Anisotropic Elastic Properties Of Biodegradable Polylactide/cnt Nanocomposites Using Molecular Dynamics Method

Among the environmentally friendly polymers, polylactide (PLA) is one of the best choices because of its renewability, biodegradability and biocompatibility. In the spite of its primary applications in bio-based fields, PLA is now receiving considerable attention as an alternative to the traditional synthetic polymers for long-term applications such as automotive and electronics. However, PLA suffers from low thermal resistance and mechanical properties. Therefore, it is desirable to improve the properties of PLA through the addition of nano-sized reinforcements such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, ceramic nanoparticles and clay. In this paper, mechanical properties of PLA reinforced with single-walled armchair carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) were studied using the molecular dynamics method. The stiffness matrix and elastic properties such as Young’s, shear and bulk moduli and Poisson’s ratio of the pure PLA and PLA/CNT nanocomposites were estimated using the constant-strain method. The effects of different factors such as weight fraction and aspect ratio of CNTs on the elastic properties of nanocomposites were investigated. From computational results, it was observed that the elastic moduli of PLA can be enhanced in presence of CNTs, and further improvement can be achieved by increasing the weight fraction of nanotubes.
Behrouz Arab