Inorganic-Organic Composite Materials from Liquid Natural Rubber and Epoxidised Natural Rubber Derivatives: Prospects and Applications

Abstract

Organic-Inorganic composite materials (OICs) are used to describe the group of materials synthesized from polymers and inorganic metal alkkoxides. The interests in these materials arised from the need to ‘combine' the physical properties of inorganic glass materials and polymers such that the resultant OICs have the strength of the inorganic glass and flexibiliy of polymeric materials. Sol-gel technique have been the technique of choice due to much of its advantages, in particular the low temperature reaction. This is very important when natural rubber and its derivatives are used as the polymer component of the OICs. Work in our laboratory has demonstrated that OICs form liquid natural rubber (LNR) and 50% epoxidised natural rubber (ENR-50) can be prepared from various metal alkoxides, such silicon, zirconium and titanium. The OICs can be prepared as flexible transparent films, nanofibers and nanobeads. This Chapter will describe the preparation techniques and the properties of these OICs from various compositions of one and more metal alkoxides in both LNR and ENR-50. The applications of these materials in PANI will be briefly described.