Investigation of Mechanical Properties of Polyester/Polyethylene glycol/TiO2 Nanocomposites

In this paper, the effects of synthesized TiO2 nanoparticles and polyethylene glycol (PEG) on mechanical, morphological, and thermal properties of unsaturated polyester (UPE) based nanocomposites were studied. The TiO2 nanoparticles were synthesized by sol-gel method. The UPE/PEG/TiO2 nanocomposites were prepared at various concentrations of synthesized TiO2 nanoparticles and PEG by direct mechanical mixing technique. The synthesized TiO2 nanoparticles were mixed with UPE resin through ultra-sonication in different weight fractions (wt%), namely, 0 wt%, 0.5 wt%, 0.75 wt%, and 1 wt%. The PEG was considered in different wt% fractions such as 5 wt%, 10 wt%, 15 wt% for preparing UPE/PEG/TiO2 nanocomposite. Consequently, chemical structure of nanocomposite was investigated with FT-IR analyses. Also, the TiO2 nanoparticles and optimized samples were characterized by TGA, SEM and XRD analyses. The results obtained by TGA, FT-IR, SEM and XRD analyses exhibited an improvement of thermal and mechanical properties of the nanocomposites containing synthesized TiO2 nanoparticles (0.5 wt%) and PEG (10 wt%) compared to pristine polyester.