Biodegradable PLA/PBS multinanolayer membrane with enhanced barrier performances

Tiphaine Messin (1) , Stéphane Marais (1) , Nadège Follain (1) , Alain Guinault (2) , Valérie Gaucher (3) , Nicolas Delpouve (4) , Cyrille Sollogoub (2)

1 PBS - Polymères Biopolymères Surfaces
2 PIMM - Laboratoire Procédés et Ingénierie en Mécanique et Matériaux
3 UMET - Unité Matériaux et Transformations - UMR 8207
4 GPM - Groupe de physique des matériaux

Polyester multilayer membranes with more than 2000 alternating layers of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and poly(butylene succinate) (PBS) were successfully prepared via a nanolayer coextrusion process equipped with a multiplying-element device. This process allows to make films consisting of very thin layers of polymers and in which a confinement effect of the semicrystalline polymer can be induced at point to significantly improve its physical properties. In this work, a homogeneous multinanolayer film of PLA/PBS was obtained without defaults or delamination, while the two polymers are immiscible. Continuous and homogeneous ultrathin layers of PBS (~45 nm) were obtained and the resulting confined structure of PBS led to an improvement of its barrier performances until 30% for oxygen, 40% for water and 70% for carbon dioxide. This improvement was explained by a decrease of the solubility coefficient and surprisingly not by the diffusion coefficient. This result was attributed to a slight orientation of the crystals in the extrusion direction and to the probable presence of an interphase between the layers of PLA and PBS.

Mots clés: Barrier properties; Coextrusion; Multilayer film; poly(butylene succinate); poly(lactic acid)

Domaines: Matériaux

Tiphaine Messin, Stéphane Marais, Nadège Follain, Alain Guinault, Valérie Gaucher, et al.. Biodegradable PLA/PBS multinanolayer membrane with enhanced barrier performances. Journal of Membrane Science, 2020, 598, pp.1-11. ⟨10.1016/j.memsci.2019.117777⟩. ⟨hal-02430440⟩