Production of PMMA-based nanocellular polymers using low demanding saturation conditions

Abstract

Nanocellular polymers are novel materials characterized by nanometric cell sizes with huge potential in many industrial applications. However, their production is challenging and usually requires demanding processing conditions that make difficult the production at industrial scale. In this work, we prove that nanocellular polymers based on PMMA can be obtained, thanks to the addition of nucleating species, using low saturation pressure (6 MPa) and room saturation temperature in a gas dissolution foaming process. Nanoparticles and block copolymers at different concentrations are used to obtain a collection of nanocellular polymers with densities ranging 0.16–0.58 and cell sizes from 120 to 900 nm. Comparison with the literature results shows that the processing parameters used in this work are the less demanding ever used for producing nanocellular PMMA.