Filler Effect on Resilience of Polymer Melts

In [191] it has been shown that the degree of swelling of the melt (d D-1)2 may be determined from  

The value of A decreases linearly with increasing filler content for a fixed filler content it increases from a filler with the spherical shape of particle to scales and further to fibers. For /J the observed behavior was reversed. 

With increasing MM the swelling increases faster in systems with a more active filler and is also somewhat greater by an absolute value than in systems with an inactive filler [183]. 

The capacity of polymer for highly-elastic (reversible) deformations also controls, in large part, the pressure loss effect at the inlet of the forming or measuring instrument. The inlet zone length (1) is related with the highly-elastic reversible deformation SR by the formula [192]  

As SR decreases, 1 must be decreased too (and thereby also the inlet pressure loss/total pressure ratio is decreased). This is what is really observed when dispersed fillers are added to polymer [182,190,193,194], The rubber phase in heat resistant polystyrene behaves much like a dispersed filler it also diminishes the inlet correction [195]. For polystyrene with different fillers the following relationship was found to be valid [196]  

---