Ultra-fast degradable PBAT/PBS foams of high performance in compression and thermal insulation made from environment-friendly supercritical foaming

Due to abundant disposable insulation materials causing serious environmental problem, degradable poly (butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) (PBAT) foam is a solution. To enhance the degradation rate and improve supercritical foaming for PBAT, poly (butylene succinate) (PBS) was selected in this work to blend with PBAT. PBAT/PBS foam with foam density lower than 0.1 g/cm3 and cell size smaller than 40 µm was successfully obtained, whose thermal conductivity was only 34 mW/m K and specific compressive strength was over 3000 N m/kg with an extremely fast degradation rate (97% material degraded within 10 days). The designation strategy is as follows: PBS’s fully aliphatic hydrocarbon structure ensures faster degradation rate than PBAT; PBS’s better molecular chain regularity accelerates crystallization for PBAT/PBS blend which ensures larger strength for blend foams; crosslinking structure and micro-phase separation structure in PBAT/PBS blend ensures better cell growth and hence larger expansion ratio, that is better thermal insulation performance.