In many medical applications, the enhancements required for medical devices are mechanical in nature. State-of-the-art, highly engineered medical devices allow physicians to perform procedures noninvasively that were previously possible only through surgery. The push to make procedures less and less invasive has put considerable pressure on medical tubing manufacturers to reduce the diameter and wall thickness of medical tubing used to make catheters and stint delivery balloons. To maintain the physical and mechanical properties of the tubing and avoid the risk of rupture, fillers are added to reinforce the polymer from which the tubing is made. The particle size of traditional polymer-reinforcing fillers such as glass, carbon and other fibrous materials are far too large to be suitable for thin walls required for the most modern of miniature medical devices. This Phase I SBIR proposal describes the preparation of a clay-like inorganic material/ polymer nanocomposite to be used in the manufacture of thin-wall, small diameter medical tubing. Polymer nanocomposites are ideally suited for this application and only a few percent (2 to 5 wt. %) of the layered material is needed to considerably reinforce the properties of the polymer. The biggest challenge in the development of the nanocomposite materials is the extensive exfoliation of the inorganic layered material into the polymer to obtain a homogenous material with continuous properties. Most nanofillers are simply intercalated into the polymer, not exfoliated. The proposed nanomaterials are ideally suited for exfoliation within medically relevant polymers and will yield particle surface areas greater then 700 m2/g - a value which greatly exceeds the surface area of current state-of-the-art, intercalated nanofillers. ? ? ?
