Wear resistance effects of alumina and carbon nanoscale fillers in PFA, FEP, and HDPE polymers

Following numerous studies demonstrating the ability of nanostructured alpha-alumina filler to reduce the prohibitively high wear rate of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) down to extremely small values (∼10−7 mm3/Nm) well below those of conventional PTFE micro-composites, alpha-alumina filler was also shown capable, in a couple recent studies, of imparting similar performance to another fluoropolymer, perfluoroalkoxy (PFA) copolymer, which otherwise was similarly lacking wear resistance in the unfilled state. In addition to duplicating such alpha-alumina performance in PFA, in this study such an extreme wear-reducing capability has also been demonstrated using nanocarbon powder, as an example representative of several other forms of nanoscale carbon filler that like alpha-alumina had been shown capable of providing extreme resistance to PTFE. Fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) copolymer, whose nanocomposites have not been tribologically explored previously, was thus more fully investigated here with not only alpha-alumina and nanocarbon, but also other nanotube (CNT) and mesoporous forms of nanoscale carbon fillers. In preliminary testing, only the alpha-alumina filler indicated an ability to impart its wear-reducing capability to FEP; a wear rate of ∼0.8 × 10−6 mm3/Nm was observed at 2 wt% alpha-alumina concentration. While this is an impressive reduction in wear rate, it is not quite as extreme a reduction as that observed in PTFE or PFA. The transport of the extreme wear resistance of nanocarbon powder in PTFE and PFA was even more partial and incomplete in FEP, with the ∼0.3 × 10−3 mm3/Nm unfilled FEP wear rate only reduced to ∼10−5 mm3/Nm, while the CNT and mesoporous carbon fillers were even less effective. Correspondingly, ATR-FTIR spectra from FEP wear surfaces displayed sizable peaks evident of the chelation of chemical interactions known to be associated with wear resistance for PTFE and PFA matrices only in the most wear-resistant alpha-alumina case and to a lesser extent for the nanocarbon. Finally, it is demonstrated that such fillers demonstrate such strongly beneficial effects only in polymers that otherwise lack wear resistance, and may actually be deleterious for polymers such as high density polyethylene (HDPE) already having some inherent wear resistance in their unfilled state.