High porosity polyethylene aerogels

Monolithic aerogels of high molecular weight polyethylene (M solvent extraction with supercritical carbon dioxide from thermoreversible gels prepared in decalin. These w= 3x106- 6x106 g/mol) have been prepared bylow density and highly porous aerogels present an apparent porosity up to 90%. The aerogel morphology observedby scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is characterized by spherulitic structures being interconnected by fbers.The X-ray diffraction experiments show that PE aerogels are highly crystalline with a degree of crystallinity ofc.a. 80% and PE chains being packed into the typical orthorombic unit cell. The combined SEM and N2 sorptioninvestigations show that PE aerogels are essentially macroporous with a small amount of mesopores. The oilsorption performance of polyethylene aerogels has been also evaluated in this study in order to assess a possibleuse of these materials for oil spillage recovery and results show that aerogel macropores allow a very fast sorptionkinetics with a 100% oil weight uptake obtained in less than 1 min. Polyolefns J (2015) 2: 49-55

Keywords:

polyethylene , thermoreversible gels , aerogels , supercritical carbon dioxide , oil spillage recovery