Nano-coating fragmentation for organic nano-composite production

Fabrizio QUADRINI, Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata

Nano-coating fragmentation is a new manufacturing technology to produce organic base nanocomposites by combining a thin film coating technology and a typical processing step for thermoplastics. This technology is under patenting and is able to prepare master-batches for the production of organic nanocomposites by injection molding or extrusion. The basic idea is using a coating technology to deposit a nanometric film of the filler material on the thermoplastic pellets which will be used in the further processing step. A typical example is coating thermoplastic pellets with silver by means of physical vapor deposition technique. These pellets are the same which are used to manufacture plastic goods. After coating, they are processed in a plasticization screw where the nano-film is fragmented in particles with at least a nanometric size thanks to the shear stresses. By means of this technology, nanocomposites can be produced without producing nanoparticles with big advantages in terms of cost reduction, safety increase and optimal affinity between base polymers and master-batches. The first application under evaluation is the production of anti-bacterial nanocomposites by filling traditional thermoplastics (such as polypropylene) with 0.1 wt% silver nanoparticles. Standard tests have shown the anti-bacterial behavior of this kind of material which is now under optimization for scaling on an industrial size.

 
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