Nanocomposites based on polyolefins and functional thermoplastic materials

Polyolefins are today the most used thermoplastic materials thanks to the high technology and sustainability of the polymerization process, their excellent thermomechanical properties and their good environmental compatibility, including easy recycling. In the last few decades much effort has been devoted worldwide to extend the applications of polyolefins by conferring on them new properties through mixing and blending with different materials. In this latter context, nanocomposites have recently offered new exciting possibilities. This has been made possible on the basis of the improvement of polyolefin functionalization processes with the availability of several olefin homo- and copolymers bearing a small (generally less than 1 mol%) amount of backbone grafted polar groups. These are indeed adequate to endow favourable interface interactions with polar macromolecules and inorganic compounds, leading first to compatible blends and then to microcomposites. The successful use of nanostructured dispersed materials has opened, on a similar basis, the way to nanocomposites as described in this review. This review provides a broad and updated description of the synthetic routes to nanostructured biphase materials having the typical structural properties of polyolefins (continuous matrix) but showing enhanced thermomechanical properties, thermostability, lower flammability, lower gas permeability and electrical and optical properties, thanks to the presence of an extended interphase interaction with very different nanodispersed species. (C) 2008 Society of Chemical Industry.