A Study on the Effect of Porous CaCO3 on Micro-cellular Plastics as an Additive for Nucleation

다공성 $CaCO_{3}$가 발포핵제로서 초미세 발포에 미치는 영향

Plastics are widely used in industry, because they are light, easily manufactured, and have high specific strength. And many researches to increase the strengths and to reduce the price are being conducted at now. One of these researches is concerning to additives. Foaming techniques are used to endow insulation properties, to improve specific strength, or reduce the material cost. Due to their unique properties, foamed plastics are applied to refrigerator, pipe, and insulators. Micro-cellular foaming is the latest foaming technique that was invented at 1980 in MIT. It is known that many tiny small cells are generated in the polymer matrices and micro-cellular foamed plastics show relatively high specific strength. We investigated the role of CaCO3 which is one of the most widely used additives in plastics industry as an additive for nucleation in view of cell morphology. CaCO3 used in this paper was treated to increase the dispersibility and to lower the density, so it has many pores at his body. Two experiments were conducted, in order to check the role of an additive for nucleation. One is compound-ability and the other one is role of nucleation agents.