Studies on Fracture Behaviors of Immiscible Polypropylene/Ethylene-co-Vinyl Acetate Blends with Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes

Immiscible polypropylene/ethylene-co-vinyl acetate (PP/EVA) blends with two different compositions, one (PP/EVA = 80/20) exhibits the typical sea-island morphology and the other (PP/EVA = 60/40) exhibits the cocontinuous morphology, were prepared with different contents of f-MWCNTs. The fracture behaviors, including notched Izod impact fracture and single-edge notched tensile (SENT) fracture, were comparatively studied to establish the role of f-MWCNTs in influencing the fracture toughness of PP/EVA blends. Our results showed that, for PP/EVA (80/20) system, f-MWCNTs do not induce the fracture behavior change apparently. However, for PP/EVA (60/40) system, the fracture toughness of the blend increases dramatically with the increasing of f-MWCNTs content. More severe plastic deformation accompanied by the fibrillar structure formation was observed during the SENT test. Furthermore, SENT test shows that the significant improvement in fracture toughness of PP/EVA (60/40) with f-MWCNTs is contributed to the simultaneous enhancement of crack initiation energy and crack propagation energy, but largely dominated by crack propagation stage. Further results based on crystalline structures and morphologies of the blends showed that a so-called dual-network structure of EVA and f-MWCNTs forms in cocontinuous PP/EVA blends, which is thought to be the main reason for the largely improved fracture toughness of the sample. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 47: 1331-1344, 2009