Nucleating agent is a kind of new functional additive that can improve the physical and mechanical properties of products such as transparency, surface gloss, tensile strength, rigidity, heat distortion temperature, impact resistance, creep resistance, etc. by changing the crystallization behavior of resins. It is widely used in the production process of incompletely crystalline plastics such as polyethylene and polypropylene in the automotive, home appliance, food, electronics, and medical fields. For instance, nucleating agent is a key material in the production of high-performance resins such as high melt index polypropylene, new high-rigidity, high-toughness, and high-crystallinity polypropylene, β-crystalline polypropylene, and modified polypropylene materials for automotive thin-walled applications. By adding specific nucleating agents, resins with improved transparency, rigidity, and toughness can be produced. With the significant increase in the domestic production of high-performance polypropylene that requires the addition of nucleating agents and the rapid growth in demand for automotive lightweighting and lithium battery separators, there is vast development potential for the nucleating agent market in.

There are many types of nucleating agents, and their product performance continues to improve. According to the different crystal forms induced by the nucleating agents, they can be divided into α-crystalline nucleating agents and β-crystalline nucleating agents. And α-crystalline nucleating agents can be further classified into inorganic, organic, and polymer types based on their structural differences. Inorganic nucleating agents mainly include early-developed nucleating agents such as talc, calcium oxide, and mica, which are inexpensive and easy to obtain but have poor transparency and surface gloss. Organic nucleating agents mainly include carboxylic acid metal salts, phosphate metal salts, sorbitol benzaldehyde derivatives, etc. Among them, sorbitol benzaldehyde derivatives are currently the most mature nucleating agents, with excellent performance and low prices, and have become the most actively developed, diverse, and largest-volume type of nucleating agents both domestically and internationally. Polymer nucleating agents are mainly high-melting-point polymeric nucleating agents, such as polyvinylcyclohexane and polyvinylpentane. β-crystalline nucleating agents mainly consist of two types: a small number of polycyclic compounds with quasi-planar structures, and those composed of certain dicarboxylic acids and oxides, hydroxides, and salts of metals from Group IIA of the periodic table. β-crystalline nucleating agents ensure the thermal deformation temperature of products while improving their impact resistance.

Examples of Product Functions and Applications of Nucleating Agents