Preparation and Properties of Organically Modified Sepiolite/ High-performance Epoxy Nanocomposites

Fibrous organic sepiolites （OSEP） and novel epoxy/OSEP nanocomposites were prepared, and different methods were investigated to produce an intercalated/exfoliated structure of OSEP. Experimental results show that the modifier molecules can be easily adsorbed by the sepiolite, but the layer space （d001 of the sepiolite, linked by means of covalent bond, remains unchanged. A proper method to solve this problem appears to exert large shearing force on the original sepiolite followed by its organic modification （OSEP2）. The morphology observation shows that there are formed an even dispersion of nano-sized OSEP2 fibers in epoxy resin and a structure intercalated by epoxy molecules, which lead to significantly improved mechanical properties. Impact strength of the epoxy/OSEP2 nanocomposite increases from 32.1 kJ/m^2 to 44.4 kJ/m^2, 38.3% higher than that of pristine matrix with 3 wt% OSEP2 content. It is also noted that the flexural strength of the OSEP/epoxy composites has risen by about 3% higher than that of the pure epoxy resin.

Preparation and Properties of Organically Modified Sepiolite/ High-performance Epoxy Nanocomposites