Structural and Barrier Properties of Compatibilized PE/PA6 Multinanolayer Films
Abstract
The barrier performance and structural lightening of organic materials are increasingly
desired and constitute a major challenge for manufacturers, particularly for transport and packaging.
A promising technique which tends to emerge in recent years is that of multinanolayer coextrusion.
The advantage is that it can produce multilayers made of thousands of very thin layers, leading to new
properties due to crystalline morphology changes induced by confinement. This paper is focusing on
the study of multinanolayered films with alternated polyethylene (PE), compatibilizer (PEgMA) and
polyamide 6 (PA6) layers and made by a forced assembly coextrusion process equipped with layer
multiplying elements (LME). PE/PA6 multilayer films consisting of 5 to 2049 layers (respectively
0 to 9 LME) were successfully obtained with well-organized multilayered structure. The evolution of
the morphology and the microstructure of these two semi-crystalline polymers, when the thickness
of each polymer layer decreases from micro-scale to nano-scale, was correlated to the water and
gas transport properties of the PE/PA multilayers. The expected improvement of barrier properties
was limited due to the on-edge orientation of crystals in very thin PE and PA6 layers. Despite this
change of crystalline morphology, a slight improvement of the gas barrier properties was shown
by comparing experimental results with permeabilities predicted on the basis of a serial model
developed by considering a PE/PA6 interphase. This interphase observed by TEM images and the
on-edge crystal orientation in multilayers were evidenced from mechanical properties showing an
increase of the stiffness and the strength.
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