The effect of Polysulfone (PSU) grafting copolymers on improving the processability of its composites

Polysulfone (PSU) as a comprehensive performance of special engineering plastics, was seriously limited its further development because of the problem of poor processability. In this paper, different PSU graft copolymer was prepared by Friedel–Crafts acylation reaction and then prepared as composite with pure PSU. The thermal resistance of composite was better with the addition of graft copolymer. And the glass transition temperature (T g ) of composite was remained essentially unchanged, whereas the activation energy of the glass transition was effectively reduced, which meant that the processability of composite was significantly improved. On the other hand, the mechanical properties were better than that of pure PSU. As expected, the processibility of PSU graft copolymer and composite were enhanced while other properties were remained basically unchanged. Among them, when the graft copolymer had a grafting rate of 32%, a graft chain length of 12C and a mass fraction of 5%, the processing performance of the PSU-g-c/PSU composites was best, which improved by about 55%. At the same time, the mechanical properties were basically unchanged and even improved. This grafting modification method will significantly improve the processibility of rigid chain polymers, thus making them have a better development prospect.