A new promising nucleating agent for polymer foaming: effects of hollow molecular-sieve particles on polypropylene...

Because polypropylene (PP) foam normally exhibits nonuniform cell size and cracked cellular structure, a narrow cell-size distribution and a well-defined morphology are always the focus of PP foaming technology. In this work, hollow molecular-sieve (MS) particles were applied as a potential nucleating agent in supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO₂) foaming of PP. It was observed that the addition of MS particles largely narrowed the cell-size distribution. The resultant PP/MS foams exhibited significant concurrent enhancement in their cell density and mechanical properties: the cell density increased remarkably, by approximately 10 times, and the tensile strength increased from 6.1 MPa to 12.6 MPa. The hollow-structure MS particles resulted in a higher heterogeneous nucleation efficiency in the PP foaming process. We believe that the trapping of CO₂ in the hollow holes of MS particles largely increased the solubility CO₂ in PP and a number of gas cavities were formed. The existence of gas cavities reduced the energy barrier of heterogeneous nucleation, favoring the formation of a well-defined cellular structure. Additionally, the regular-hexagon shape of the cells might endow the PP foam with better mechanical properties compared with a circular cell shape.