Screw Extrusion as a Scalable Technology for Manufacturing Carbon Nanotube-Filled Polylactide Composites

The bottleneck in the widespread use of carbon multiwall nanotube polymer composites is the lack of manufacturing technology that can be used on an industrial scale. In this article, we describe a two-step composite manufacturing technology based on screw extrusion that produces composites characterizing with good dispersion of carbon nanotube filler in polylactide matrix. The first stage involved the fabrication of highly filled masterbatches of 25 wt% of carbon nanotubes. In the second stage, by screw extrusion of the masterbatch mixture with neat polymer, we obtained homogeneous composites with the target filler concentration. The resulting composites with nanotube content ranging from 0.1 to 2 wt%. Mechanical tests including static tension, tensile strength, tensile modulus, three-point bending and impact strength has shown that optimal concentration of the carbon nanotube filler is ranged between 0.5 and 1 wt%. Samples were examined also by SEM, FTIR-ATR, DSC and MFR methods.