Facile preparation of light‐weight biodegradable and electrically conductive polymer based nanocomposites for superior electromagnetic interference shielding effectiveness

Abstract

Abstract Harmful electromagnetic radiations that are generated from different electronic devices could be absorbed by a light weight and mechanically flexible good electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding polymer nanocomposite. On the other hand, different electronic wastes (“e‐wastes”) which are generally polymer building materials generated from wastes of dysfunctional electronic devices are not naturally biodegradable. Our recent effort has been employed to produce bio‐degradable EMI shielding polymer nanocomposite. For that purpose, we had prepared a 50:50 ratio polylactic acid/thermoplastic polyurethane polymer nanocomposite by mixing the conducting carbon black with the blend following the facile and industrially feasible solution mixing method. Morphological characterizations by scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy analysis revealed the co‐continuous morphology of the neat blend as well as polymer nanocomposites with the preferential distribution of conductive filler on a particular polymer phase. The polymer nanocomposites gave good mechanically with improved thermal properties. We got EMI shielding effectiveness around −27 dB with a low percolation threshold at around 30 wt% filler loading in the polymer nanocomposite at the X‐band frequency domain (8.2–12.4 GHz). Later we had studied the biodegradability of the PLA/TPU along with their composites (T X P X C X ) by employing the respirometry method and got a satisfactory result to ensure their biodegradability.