Influence of interface on the dielectric response, electrical and thermal conductivity of high density polyethylene based composites

The influence of interface on the dielectric response, electrical and thermal conductivity of the filled high density polyethylene (HDPE) was studied. Two types of composites containing 10 wt% of polyaniline (PAni) as filler was used. It was shown that the degradation temperature of the composites is slightly lower than that of the pure matrix. The crystalline content was found to remain unchanged at 67% for all composites except in the case of HDPE/PAni core-shell structure which exhibits a slightly higher crystalline content of 75%. The presence of PAni in the composite systems contributed to the increase of the conductivity by about eight orders of magnitude for the composite when stearic acid was used as a compatibilizer. The thermal conductivity of HDPE/PAni 10 wt% films was also found to remain unchanged at 0.35 W/m.K. The microstructure study by scanning electron microscopy revealed that the stearic acid helped to achieve a reasonably good dispersion of PAni in HDPE matrix.