Abstract:
It is crucial for flexible capacitive energy storage applications to produce polymer
nanocomposites with high dielectric properties and the addition of inorganic
nanofillers can significantly increase the dielectric constant of dielectric polymers.
Low-density polyethylene (LDPE) is a polymer with excellent dielectric properties
and is extensively used in electrical equipment. Various commercially available
nanofillers have been employed for this purpose, but the objective of current research
is to use waste-derived material known as biomass fly ash (BFA) as a nanofiller to
improve the dielectric constant of LDPE because it possesses a versatile composition
with various metal oxides makes it an attractive nanofiller.. The BFA-LDPE sheets
were made using a conventional solvent mixing and subsequent hot-pressing
procedure with a range of BFA loadings, and the impact of different loadings was
carefully examined. Synthesized composites are thoroughly investigated and
characterized by using different characterization techniques including XRD, SEM,
FTIR, and TGA to study the crystallographic properties, morphology, chemical
composition, and thermal stability. . Moreover, the dielectric constant is also studied
and among all the nanocomposites, 4% BFA-LDPE has shown the maximum
dielectric constant having value of 11.58 with respect to untreated LDPE having an
8.33 dielectric constant due to the synergistic effect of different inorganic metal
oxides (SiO2, MgO and Fe2O3) present in BFA. Overall, the results indicated a
significant improvement, proving that the waste derived BFA can be used as
influential nanofiller in the LDPE based composite and 4% BFA-LDPE composite
may be employed for electrical insulating applications in future studies.
