Use of PP-g-OXA in the compatibilization of PP/LCP blends

Abstract

Adding small amounts of liquid crystalline polymers (LCP) to flexible thermoplastic matrices (FTP) allows to enhance the mechanical and thermomechanical properties. Therefore it is possible to obtain materials with new properties only by simple mixing. A strong shortcoming is the incompatibility between LCP and FTP that leads to materials with very poor properties unusable for commercial pourposes. The presence of a compatibilizer is therefore required. Oxazoline functionality is known to be highly reactive toward many other functional groups and then oxazoline functionalized polymers can be efficiently used as compatibilizer precursors. In this work the compatibilizazion of polypropylene (PP) with a semirigid LCP by using an ad hoc tailored oxazoline functionalized PP has been studied.