Nanostrength®: bock copolymers for advanced composite materials
Arkema is the world's first chemicals producer to market a range of acrylic block copolymers: Nanostrength®. Their major innovation is an acrylic block which is miscible with many polymers, most of which are the major industrial epoxy resins. Until now, composite materials have not been able to benefit from these technologies as most of the materials they consist of are not compatible with traditional block copolymers. Two Nanostrength® groups are now available: polyStyrene-block-poly(1,4-Butadiene)-block-poly(Methylmethacrylate) (SBM ) and poly(Methylmethacrylate)-block-poly(Butylacrylate)-block-poly(Methylmethacrylate) (MMA).
In the age of nanotechnologies, changing matter at the nanoscale level offers some very interesting property trade-offs. And yet, these new technologies have produced very few industrial achievements. The main obstacle is the difficulty in breaking matter down to the nanoscale using industrial techniques. Block copolymers are made up of several distinct, chemically different segments. By their very nature, they self-assemble at the molecular scale. The driving force behind this organization - thermodynamics - has the power to organize, in a highly reproducible and accurate manner, any polymer which is miscible with one of the blocks of the copolymer it is mixed with. This reinforces mechanical properties without jeopardizing the inherent properties of the host matrices, while also making processing more reliable.
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