Transient Grating Experiments on Inorganic

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Vol. 12, Special Issue, October 2011, pp.46-52

Transient Grating Experiments on Inorganic–elastomer Nanocomposites

^{1, 2}Andrea TASCHIN, ¹Paolo BARTOLINI, ³Antoni SÁNCHEZ-FERRER, ³Raffaele MEZZENGA, ⁴Aleš MRZEL and ^{1, 5} Renato TORRE

¹ European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy, Università di Firenze,

via Carrara 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy

² Istituto Nazionale di Ottica (INO)- CNR, Largo E. Fermi 6, I-50125, Firenze, Italy

³ ETH Zürich Institute of Food, Nutrition & Health, Food & Soft Materials Science Group, Schmelzbergstrasse 9, LFO, E23-E29, CH-8092 Zürich, Switzerland

⁴ J. Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, SI 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

⁵ Dipartimento di Fisica ed Astronomia, Università di Firenze, via Sansone 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy

E-mail: taschin@lens.unifi.it, bart@lens.unifi.it, torre@lens.unifi.it, antoni.sanchez@agrl.ethz.ch, raffaele.mezzenga@agrl.ethz.ch, ales.mrzel@ijs.si

Received: 15 June 2011 /Accepted: 18 July 2011 /Published: 31 October 2011

Abstract: We studied the photo-elastic and photo-thermal response of two new nanocomposites base on a polyurea elastomer mixed with inorganic nanotubes (MoS₂) or nanowires (Mo₆S₂I₈). The investigation has been performed using time-resolved laser spectroscopy, transient grating technique (TG), based on short laser pulses. This spectroscopic tool enables the measurement of the thermo-elastic response of the nanocomposites covering a very large time window, from nanoseconds to milliseconds, revealing the different dynamic phenomena present in these materials. On the fast timescale (from 1 to 100 ns) the TG signal shows the propagation of a high frequency acoustic wave enabling the measure of its sound velocity and damping time. In the slow time window (from 5 to 100 ms) the TG signal presents a slow decay due to the thermal diffusion process. As expected, these features are common for both pure polymeric and nanocomposite samples. Surprisingly, the presence of nanotubes or nanowires in the polymeric matrix produces on the intermediate time scale a new dynamic phenomenon in the experimental data, whose origin is not clear.

Keywords: Inorganic nanotubes, Polymer nanocomposites, Photo-thermal and photo-elastic phenomena, Time-resolved laser spectroscopy, Elastomer, Polyurea

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1, 2 Andrea TASCHIN, 1 Paolo BARTOLINI, 3 Antoni SÁNCHEZ-FERRER, 3 Raffaele MEZZENGA, 4 Aleš MRZEL and 1, 5 Renato TORRE

^{1, 2}Andrea TASCHIN, ¹Paolo BARTOLINI, ³Antoni SÁNCHEZ-FERRER, ³Raffaele MEZZENGA, ⁴Aleš MRZEL and ^{1, 5} Renato TORRE