A facile method to prepare polypropylene/poly(butyl acrylate) alloy via water-solid phase suspension grafting polymerization

Polypropylene/poly(butyl acrylate) alloy is produced by water-solid phase suspension grafting polymerization with a submicrometer microdomain where graft polymerization occurs within micropores of polypropylene particles prepared by reactor granule technology (RGT). The results show that the grafting percentage (GP) of butyl acrylate (BA) increases with the increase of the monomer concentration, which could reach 32.6% while the grafting efficiency (GE) is up to 98%. The addition of the crosslinking agent, triethylene glycol diacrylate (TEGDA), could improve GP up to 36.3%. Transmission electron microscopic (TEM) micrographs demonstrate that PBA microdomains distributed in PP matrix increase in size less than 500 nm. Moreover, TEM images show that the grafting phase exhibits a single-phase behavior with the addition of TEGDA, which implies that the ratio of graft copolymer increased. (C) 2015 Chinese Chemical Society and Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.