Polydimethylsiloxane Composites Characterization and Its Applications: A Review

Abstract

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is one of the most promising elastomers due its remarkable proprieties such as good thermal stability, biocompatibility, corrosion resistance, flexibility, low cost, ease of use, chemically inertia, hyperplastic characteristics, and gas permeability. Thus, it can be used in areas such as microfluidic systems, biomedical devices, electronic components, membranes for filtering and pervaporation, sensors, and coatings. Although pure PDMS has low mechanical properties, such as low modulus of elasticity and strength, it can be improved by mixing the PDMS with other polymers and by adding particles or reinforcements. Fiber-reinforced PDMS has proved to be a good alternative to manufacturing flexible displays, batteries, wearable devices, tactile sensors, and energy harvesting systems. PDMS and particulates are often used in the separation of liquids from wastewater by means of porosity followed by hydrophobicity. Waxes such as beeswax and paraffin have proved to be materials capable of improving properties such as the hydrophobic, corrosion-resistant, thermal, and optical properties of PDMS. Finally, when blended with polymers such as poly (vinyl chloride-co-vinyl acetate), PDMS becomes a highly efficient alternative for membrane separation applications. However, to the best of our knowledge there are few works dedicated to the review and comparison of different PDMS composites. Hence, this review will be focused on PDMS composites, their respective applications, and properties. Generally, the combination of elastomer with fibers, particles, waxes, polymers, and others it will be discussed, with the aim of producing a review that demonstrates the wide applications of this material and how tailored characteristics can be reached for custom applications.

Low-Cost Multifunctional Vacuum Chamber for Manufacturing PDMS Based Composites

“…The arithmetic average of the tensile strength of samples manufactured by the conventional method is approximately 2.36 MPa, which is consistent with the studies reported in the literature [15]. For the MVC samples, the tensile strength corresponds to 3.27 MPa.…”

“…The maximum tensile strength of the samples manufactured with the MVC improved about 39% when compared to the samples manufactured by the conventional method. When it comes to the maximum strain of the samples, the results were 0.48 and 0.81 for the samples manufactured by the conventional method and manufactured in the MVC, respectively, being consistent with the literature [15]. Hence, these results show that was an improvement bigger than 65% when compared to samples manufactured using MVC and manufactured using the conventional method.…”

“…The main characteristics of this material are its highly flexible [10], biocompatibility [11], optically transparent [12] and low cost. To improve mechanical, thermal, and optical properties, it is possible to mix waxes [13] or nanoparticles with PDMS [14], among other materials [15]. This makes material have a wide applicability and improvement of some aspects such as superhydrophobic surfaces, water repellent [16], anti-icing, self-cleaning [17] and antiscaling [18], among other surficial properties [15].…”

Properties and Applications of PDMS for Biomedical Engineering: A Review

“…Adding waxes such as paraffin or beeswax to PDMS has been demonstrated to potentially increase the corrosion resistance, hydrophobicity and thermal and optical properties of PDMS, which is useful in applications such as sensors, wearable devices and superhydrophobic coating [ 83 ].…”

Fluid Flow and Structural Numerical Analysis of a Cerebral Aneurysm Model

“…An important characteristic of blood vessels is the existence of soft tissues, which have a behavior called hyperelasticity [10]. Hyperelastic materials have a mechanical behavior characterized by a high deformation before reaching the breaking strength [11,12]. Due to the risks involved, it is very difficult to analyze in vivo the biomechanical behavior of blood vessels, particularly in the region of the aneurysm [13].…”