Enhancement of properties of polycarbonates for low temperature applications

Polycarbonates (PC) are widely used as a high performance engineering plastics having an edge over other polymers for its impact, optical, tensile and thermal properties. PC, however, suffers to a drastic reduction in its impact properties at sub-zero temperature near the ductile-brittle-transition. Researchers have done extensive work on enhancing its property at low temperature and also studied the effect of modification on other important properties of PC. A substantial research work available in literature has been reviewed and PC properties, materials, basic approaches for property enhancement, characterization methods etc. have been discussed. The conventional methods like blending and copolymerization, and recently developed methods like nano-addition and reactive blending for property enhancement have been reviewed