Impact Modification of Isotactic Polypropylene with Ethylene-Propylene Diene Monomer Rubber

The present work was done to improve the impact property of isotactic polypropylene (PP), especially at low temperatures, by incorporating ethylene propylene diene monomers (EPDM). This was done by ensuring compatibility between the two polymers with phase modifiers polyethylene grafted with maleic anhydride (PE-g-MA) and initiator dicumyl peroxide (DCP). In addition, attempts were also made to understand the fundamentals of impact toughening as well as fracture toughness, and to correlate the results with that of morphological evidences obtained from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) methods. Varying the ratios of all blend composition, mechanical properties were studied. It was observed that as the rubber fraction increased, the impact property as well as fracture toughness increased. All these tests also showed promising results when PE-g-MA was added, leading to more improvement in all the mechanical properties including increase in crystallite size. It had shown plasticization effect on the compositions, which could be further confirmed by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) compared to the uncompatibilized ones. But when DCP was added, it behaved like an initiator which directly reacted with the PP matrix, decreasing the molecular weight of the blend with decreasing size of the crystallites.