Property Investigation of Styrene-co-Butyl Acrylate / Cloisite Na+ Nanocomposite Film Synthesized by Pickering polymerization

In this work styrene-co-butyl acrylate/Cloisite Na+ latex particles were synthesized by Pickering emulsion polymerization. Then its nanocomposite films were fabricated and investigated by various analyses such as FTIR,DSC, TGA, EDX, tensile and contact angle measurements. The results of this research work revealed exfoliated nanoclay structure for the samples containing 6 and 8 wt % Cloisite Na+ and intercalated nanoclay structure for sample containing 10 wt % Cloisite Na+. The increase in tensile strength and Young’s modulus of nanocomposite films showed high effects of nanoclay on the film mechanical properties, mainly due to the presence of the delaminated clay layers regularly all within the styrene-co-butyl acrylate / Cloisite Na+ matrix. However, the contact angle values for the crude copolymer film (styrene-co-butyl acrylate film) and its’nanocomposites film (styrene-cobutyl acrylate / Cloisite Na+ film) did not show any distinguished changes and were almost equal in value