Thermoplastic Nanocomposites and Their Processing Techniques

Abstract

Nanotechnology is one of the most up-to-the-minute areas in essentially all technical disciplines of chemistry, electronics, high-density magnetic recording media, sensors and biotechnology,etc. During the last decade, due to the emergence of a new generation of high- technology materials, the number of research groups involved in nanotechnology has increased exponentially covering a broad range of topics such as microelectronics (now known as nanoelectronics, because the critical dimension scale for modern devices has decreased to and /or below 100 nanometer (nm) (Paul & Robeson 2008)), polymer-based biomaterials (Haider et al.,2007), nanoparticle drug delivery (Omer et al., 2011), miniemulsion particles (Zhang et al ., 2007; Wu et al., 2010)], layer-by-layer self-assembled polymer films (Lee & Cui 2009), electrospun nanofibers (Haider & Park, 2009; Haider et al., 2010), imprint lithography (Stephen et al., 1996), polymer blends and nanocomposites (Kim et al .,2005). The dimensional shift of materials from micro to nano produced theatrical changes in their physical properties and one such change is large surface area for a given volume (Haider et al.,2007). Therefore nanoscale materials can have substantially different properties from their corresponding large- dimensional materials of the same composition. Surface area per unit volume is inversely proportional to diameter, thus, the smaller the diameter, the greater the surface area per unit volume (Luo & Danie, 2003).