title: Highly ductile UV-shielding polymer composites with boron nitride nanospheres as fillers.
abstract: Polymer composites with enhanced mechanical, thermal or optical performance usually suffer from poor ductility induced by confined mobility of polymer chains. Herein, highly ductile UV-shielding polymer composites are successfully fabricated. Boron nitride (BN) materials, with a wide band gap of around ∼6.0 eV, are used as fillers to achieve the remarkably improved UV-shielding performance of a polymer matrix. In addition, it is found that spherical morphology BN as a filler can keep the excellent ductility of the composites. For a comparison, it is demonstrated that traditional fillers, including conventional BN powders can achieve the similar UV-shielding performance but dramatically decrease the composite ductility. The mechanism behind this phenomenon is believed to be lubricant effects of BN nanospheres for sliding of polymer chains, which is in consistent with the thermal analyses. This study provides a new design to fabricate UV-shielding composite films with well-preserved ductility.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Materials Science, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Yuqiao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Wenjun
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Meng
authors.forename: Zifeng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Yoshio
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bando
authors.forename: Dmitri
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Golberg
authors.forename: Chengchun
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: Chunyi
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhi