Effect of heat treatments on silicon dioxide and silicon nitride nanocomposites

Abstract

This project determined the effect of breakdown strength when heat treatment process was applied on nanocomposites. Unlike the normal approach where nanocomposites rarely takes into account the effect of heat treatment process, the heat treatment method used in this project was by heating to nanocomposites under 3 conditions of temperature. The proposed approach utilized nanosilica and nanosilicon nitride as the nanofillers and polyethylene blend as the base polymer with the nanocomposites exposed to heat treatment under vacuum at temperatures of 80°C, 90°C and 100°C. The results showed that unfilled polyethylene blend had the highest measurement of breakdown strength which were 27.82% and 10.89% higher when compared with the addition on 1 wt% nanosilica and 1 wt% nanosilicon nitride at ambient temperature. However, when the thin film samples were treated with 3 types of heat treatment in vacuum condition and underwent DC breakdown test afterwards, the results for samples treated at 90°C improved, where the addition of 1 wt% nanosilica and 1 wt% nanosilicon nitride increased to 3.45% and 28.88% when compared with unfilled polyethylene blend. This meant the conditioning of heat treatment could improve the characteristic of the dielectric properties of the nanocomposites. The work can be considered significant due to the fact that the breakdown strength of nanocomposites will be affected by the type of nanofillers used and heat treatment process on the nanocomposites.