An experimental investigation on the influence of pore foaming agent particle size on cell morphology, hydrophobicity, and acoustic performance of open cell poly (vinylidene fluoride) polymeric foams

Nivedhitha Durgam Muralidharan; Jeyanthi Subramanian

doi:10.1515/polyeng-2024-0124

Article

An experimental investigation on the influence of pore foaming agent particle size on cell morphology, hydrophobicity, and acoustic performance of open cell poly (vinylidene fluoride) polymeric foams

Nivedhitha Durgam Muralidharan and Jeyanthi Subramanian

Published/Copyright: September 6, 2024

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From the journal Journal of Polymer Engineering Volume 44 Issue 10

Abstract

Globally, the development of porous structured materials has been receiving incredible responses for various high-performance engineering applications. Piezoelectric cellular foams have recently attracted the attention of researchers to emerging applications of acoustic sensors, low-frequency hydrophones, and energy-harvesting devices. As pore morphology is closely related to the shape and the size of the pore-foaming agent, it is necessary to address the influence of particle size of the foaming agent on cell morphology to expand their application area. Hence, this research article establishes the impact of particle size of pore foaming agents on pore morphology, hydrophobicity, and acoustic characteristics of open-cell polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) based piezoelectric cellular composites. Open-cell PVDF cellular composites have been fabricated using the template removal method with sodium chloride (NaCl) as a sacrificial templating agent in three different particle sizes: larger, medium, and finer. Based on the experimental results, it can be stated that the particle size of the templating agents dramatically influences the pore morphology, hydrophobicity, and acoustics performance of the PVDF foam samples. The PVDF foams possessing medium pore size have exhibited a maximum sound absorption coefficient of 0.89 at a frequency range of 1,000–1,500 Hz, indicating that PVDF foams have great potential for noise-controlling applications.

Keywords: piezoelectric; PVDF; open-cell; acoustics; sustainability

Corresponding author: Jeyanthi Subramanian, School of Mechanical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai Campus, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 600127, India, E-mail: Jeynives999@gmail.com

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to VIT University for providing a seed fund and well-equipped laboratories for conducting the experimental work.

Research ethics: Not applicable.
Informed consent: Not applicable.
Author contributions: D M N: methodology, experimentation and validation, J S: conceptualization, supervision, validation. The authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved it for submission.
Competing interests: The authors declare that they do not have any conflicts of interest in publishing the article.
Research funding: The authors have not received any external funding to publish the current article.
Data availability: The raw data can be obtained on request from the corresponding author.

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Received: 2024-06-14

Accepted: 2024-08-17

Published Online: 2024-09-06

Published in Print: 2024-11-26

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/polyeng-2024-0124

Keywords for this article

piezoelectric; PVDF; open-cell; acoustics; sustainability