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International Journal of Polymer Science
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 389491, 5 pages
doi:10.1155/2012/389491
Dielectric Relaxation Phenomena of Polylactic Acid with -Crystalline Chitin
Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, Hachinohe Institute of Technology, 88-1 Myo Ohbiraki, Hachinohe 031-8501, Japan
Received 2 December 2011; Accepted 6 February 2012
Academic Editor: Deon Bezuidenhout
Copyright © 2012 Katsuyoshi Shinyama et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
-crystalline chitin was added to polylactic acid (PLA), and this PLA was then heat-treated at for one minute. The crystallinity of the heat-treated PLA increased to more than 40%, and its crystallization speed also increased significantly. The temperature dependency of these materials’ relative permittivity () and relative dielectric loss factor () was also examined. The dielectric absorption peak value in curve of the PLA to which chitin was added and was smaller than that of PLA without chitin. Additionally, the Havriliak-Negami relaxation function was used to produce approximation curves for the frequency dependency of and of chitin with PLA added at . As a result, the relaxation strength of the chitin with PLA added was smaller than that of the PLA without chitin, and the relaxation time of the chitin with PLA added was approximately 2.5 times larger than that of the PLA without chitin.