Preparation of Poly(ether-imide) Foam Parts by Supercritical Carbon Dioxide/Ethanol Co-foaming Method
WANG Bo1, FENG Dong1,2
1 Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650500, China; 2 State Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering, Polymer Research Institute of Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
Abstract: In this paper, the foaming behaviors of poly(ether-imide) (PEI) in supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) were studied by depressurization batch foaming method. The effects of saturation pressure, foaming temperature and depressurization rate on PEI foam structure were systematically studied. Co-blowing agents and nucleating agent were further introduced to enhance the foaming ability and optimize the foam structures. PEI beads were foamed and fused simultaneously in the confined stainless mould to obtain PEI foamed parts with adjustable expansion ratio and cellular structure. The results indicated that the expansion ratio of PEI by using scCO2 as foaming agent were less than 3 fold, due to the harsh foaming conditions; the introduction of co-blowing agents such as tetrahydrofuran (THF) and ethanol (EtOH) was very helpful to improve the foaming ability and increase the expansion ratio, the nucleation number and cell density could be further enhanced by using carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as nucleating agent. The PEI and PEI/CNTs foam parts obtained from co-foaming method featured fine inter-bead bonding qualities and exhibited excellent mechanical performance, the tensile strength and compression strength of the PEI foam were 5.7 MPa and 5.6 MPa, respectively.
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