A Compatibilizing Strategy for Upcycling Polyethylene and Polystyrene with Ethylene/(Phenyl Functionalized α-Olefin) Copolymers Containing Continuous Comonomer Segments

作者：Hui Tian, Yifan Wang, Chunji Wu, Baoli Wang · 发表于：Macromolecules · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1021/acs.macromol.4c00275 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：Polymer crystallization and properties、biodegradable polymer synthesis and properties、Recycling and Waste Management Techniques

Polyethylene (PE) and polystyrene (PS) are commercial plastics with large amounts of output, and their wastes have brought serious burden to our living environment. These usually exist as PE/PS mixtures and are hard or expensive to sort in some cases. PE/PS blends have poor mechanical properties due to thermodynamic incompatibilization. In principle, ethylene/(phenyl functionalized α-olefin) copolymers (containing PE and continuous phenyl α-olefin segments on one polymeric chain) would be good compatibilizers for PE/PS, but the synthesis of corresponding copolymers is much more difficult. Herein, we report the synthesis of ethylene-styrene ( E - St ), ethylene-allylbenzene ( E - AP ), and ethylene-(4-phenyl-1-butene) ( E - BP ) copolymers containing continuous comonomer segments via the copolymerization of E with various phenyl functionalized α-olefin monomers ( St, AP, and BP) catalyzed by thiophene-fused cyclopentadienyl scandium complexes and study the compatibilization of resultant copolymers for HDPE/PS blends by using tensile test experiment and SEM and TEM analyses. E - BP copolymers behaved like adhesive materials with high BP incorporation ranged from 13.5 to 24.1 mol % and showed better compatibilization effect for HDPE/PS blends compared with E - St and E - AP, probably because of the longer distance between the polymeric main chain and phenyl group on its molecular structure, which favors the intermolecular π–π interaction between E - BP and PS during melting mixi...