Recent Progress of Biodegradable Polymer Package Materials: Nanotechnology Improving Both Oxygen and Water Vapor Barrier Performance.

Biodegradable polymers have become a topic of great scientific and industrial interest due to their environmentally friendly nature. For the benefit of the market economy and environment, biodegradable materials should play a more critical role in packaging materials, which currently account for more than 50% of plastic products. However, various challenges remain for biodegradable polymers for practical packaging applications. Particularly pertaining to the poor oxygen/moisture barrier issues, which greatly limit the application of current biodegradable polymers in food packaging. In this review, various strategies for barrier property improvement are summarized, such as chain architecture and crystallinity tailoring, melt blending, multi-layer co-extrusion, surface coating, and nanotechnology. These strategies have also been considered effective ways for overcoming the poor oxygen or water vapor barrier properties of representative biodegradable polymers in mainstream research.

Significantly enhanced dielectric constant and energy storage properties in polyimide/reduced BaTiO3 composite films with excellent thermal stability.

In this work, reduced BaTiO3 (rBT) particles with a large number of defects sintered in a reducing atmosphere (95N2/5H2) were introduced into polyimide (PI) matrix without using any modifier or surfactant components. The rBT/PI composite films fabricated by an in situ polymerization method showed significantly enhanced dielectric constant and energy storage density. The dielectric constant of the rBT/PI composite with 30 wt% rBT reached up to 31.6, while maintaining lower loss (tg δ = 0.031@1000 kHz) compared to pure PI (ε r = 4.1). Its energy storage density (9.7 J cm-3 at 2628 kV cm-1) was enhanced by more than 400% over that of pure PI (1.9 J cm-3 at 3251 kV cm-1), and was greater than the energy density of the best commercial biaxially-oriented-polypropylenes (BOPP) (1.2 J cm-3 at 6400 kV cm-1). The energy storage efficiency was around 90% due to the linear dielectric performance of rBT/PI composite films. The improved dielectric constant and energy storage density could be attributed to the combined effect of the interface interaction between two phases and the surface defects of rBT induced by the reducing atmosphere. Therefore, rBT/PI composite films with high dielectric constant, energy storage density and storage efficiency may have potential applications in the preparation of embedded capacitors.