Thermo-Mechanical and Creep Behaviour of Polylactic Acid/Thermoplastic Polyurethane Blends

Abstract

There is a great need to develop biodegradable thermoplastics for a variety of applications in a wide range of temperatures. In this work, we prepare polymer blends from polylactic acid (PLA) and thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) via a melting blend method at 200 °C and study the creep deformation of the PLA/TPU blends in a temperature range of 10 to 40 °C with the focus on transient and steady-state creep. The stress exponent for the power law description of the steady state creep of PLA/TPU blends decreases linearly with the increase of the mass fraction of TPU from 1.73 for the PLA to 1.17 for the TPU. The activation energies of the rate processes for the steady-state creep and transient creep decrease linearly with the increase of the mass fraction of TPU from 97.7 ± 3.9 kJ/mol and 59.4 ± 2.9 kJ/mol for the PLA to 26.3 ± 1.3 kJ/mol and 25.4 ± 1.7 kJ/mol for the TPU, respectively. These linearly decreasing trends can be attributed to the weak interaction between the PLA and the TPU. The creep deformation of the PLA/TPU blends consists of the contributions of individual PLA and TPU.

Keywords

• polylactic acid
• thermoplastic polyurethane
• creep
• non-linear Burgers model
• activation energy