The Dynamic Properties at Elevated Temperature of the Thermoplastic Polystyrene Matrix Modified with Nano-Alumina Powder and Thermoplastic Elastomer

Abstract

The performance improvement of advanced electronic packaging material is an important topic to meet the stringent demands of modern semiconductor devices. This paper studies the incorporation of nano-alumina powder and thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) into thermoplastic polystyrene matrix to tune the thermal and mechanical properties after injection molding process. In the sample preparation, acetone was employed as a solvent to avoid the powder escape into surrounding during the mechanical mixing in a twin-screw mixer. The pressure and shear force were able to mix the composite with good uniformity in compositions. The samples with different compositions were fabricated using injection molding. The measured results showed that adding 5 wt.% of TPE into the simple polystyrene was able to raise the melt flow index from 12.3 to 13.4 g/10 min while the thermal decomposition temperature remained nearly unchanged. Moreover, the addition of small amount of nano-alumina powder could quickly improve the mechanical property by raising its storage modulus. For example, the addition of 3 wt.% of nano-alumina powder had an increase of 7.3% in storage modulus. Over doping of nano-alumina powder in the composite, such as 10 wt.%, on the other hand, lowered the storage modulus from 2404 MPa to 2069 MPa. The experimental study demonstrated that the tuning in the polystyrene’s thermal and mechanical properties is feasible by composition modification with nano-alumina powder and TPE. The better concentration of the additives should be determined according to the specific applications.