Anisotropic clay–polystyrene nanocomposites: Synthesis, characterization and mechanical properties

Recent studies on clay–polymer nanocomposites have shown prominent improvements in thermal and mechanical properties with the addition of quite small amounts of nanometer sized clay particles. The present work presents characterization of anisotropic clay–polystyrene nanocomposites synthesized via a guided self-assembly technique, employing electric fields to align the clay particles into chain-like structures inside the polymer matrix. Four different kinds of surface modified clay were used as particle additives, namely Hectorite, Laponite, Na-Montmorillonite and Li-Fluorohectorite. The microstructure of the nanocomposites was examined with wide angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), X-ray computed microtomography (XMT) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) was further employed to examine the high-temperature resilience of the nanocomposites before determination of the mechanical properties during compression. The results showed that the nanocomposites were of the intercalated type with the clay dispersed as ~ 15–70 nm thick crystallites which in turn aggregated into micrometer sized particles. Alignment of the clay particles into chains inside the polymer matrix led to differences in mechanical properties compared to nanocomposites having a random orientation of the clay particles. In particular the aligned polystyrene–fluorohectorite nanocomposite displayed large improvements compared to its non-aligned counterpart. It was also observed that differences in yield strength depended on the compression direction.