Effect of polymer adsorption on film formation of silica/PVA suspension

Understanding the polymer adsorption in particle/binder/solvent system is important to achieve successful film products. While most of the reported work has dealt with the suspension microstructure, a few studies have focused on film formation. We investigated the effect of adsorption on film formation through measurement of adsorption amount in suspension and stress development in drying film with respect to mixing time ($t_m$). All of the adsorption amount (PVA), characteristic stress ($\sigma_{ch}$) exhibited similarities expressed by the form of $1-e^{t_m/{\tau}}$. The porous and non-unifonn dried film at short tm became close-packed and uniform with longer $t_m$. We found that polymer adsorption plays the key role in film fonnation as it introduces steric repulsion in suspension and suppresses the flocculation during solvent evaporation. We also found that the mixing time for the saturated polymer adsorption is the important variable to acquire the consolidated and uniform film microstructure.