Toughness enhancement of polyamide 6,12 with intermolecular hydrogen bonding with 3-pentadecylphenol

Due to the brittle performance of polyamide 6,12 (PA6,12) in high impact environment, we report a facile, efficient, and scalable method to toughen PA6,12 by establishing intermolecular hydrogen bonding (H-bonding) interaction with 3-pentadecylphenol (PDP). Interestingly, the intermolecular H-bonding interaction obviously hindered PA crystallization, which was evidenced by decrease of crystalline temperature from 186.8 to 175.8 degrees C and prolong of crystallization half-time from 0.27 to 0.37 min, when the amount of PDP was increased to 30 wt%. Consequently, the toughness of the PA6,12/PDP composites containing 30 wt% PDP was improved and their notched impact strength reached to 17.5 kJ m(-2), about three times higher than that of the neat PA6,12. It was deduced that both plasticizing effect and intermolecular H-bonding interaction played critical roles in PA6,12 resultant composites toughness, which opens a new perspective of PA6,12 toughening for a wide range of applications.