Melt-crystallized polymer morphologies

It is much more common for melt-crystallized polymers to show a spherulitic type of structure. In this morphology, the crystallites are packed into spheres, except where... 

As pointed out above, the semicrystalline polymer can be considered as a two-phase composite of amorphous regions sandwiched between hard crystalline lamellae (Fig. 4.2(a)). Crystal lamellae ( c) are normally 10-25 nm thick and have transverse dimensions of 0.1-1 pm while the amorphous layer thickness, a, is 5-10 nm. As mentioned in the previous section, melt-crystallized polymers generally exhibit a spherulitic morphology in which ribbon-like lamellae are arranged radially in the polycrystalline aggregate (Bassett, 1981). Since the indentation process involves plastic yielding under the stress field of the indenter, microhardness is correlated to the modes of deformation of the semicrystalline polymers (see Chapter 2). These... 

C), it has been observed that its crystallization from the melt is enhanced [103-106], Melt crystallized polymers nucleated with n-s polymer-CD-ICs crystallize more rapidly, evidence greater levels of crystallinity, higher melt crystallization temperatures, and semicrystalline morphologies characterized by crystals which are smaller and more uniformly distributed than in un-nucleated pure bulk samples. 

Melt Crystallized.—Spherulites are observed to consist of radiating fibrils or lamellae which in melt-crystallized polymers are 100—500 A thick, depending on crystallization temperature, and /um in breadth. The c axis, i.e, the chain direction, coincides with the thickness of the lamellae and, by analogy to single crystal morphology, the molecular chain folds backwards into the lamellae. Amorphous polymer fills the regions between lamellae and can account for a substantial amount of the content. Painter et al. have shown that these inter-lamellar regions are very similar to melt-crystallized polymer in their i.r. spectrum. 

If crystallization is carried out from concentrated solutions, multilamellar aggregates are formed. In particular, melt crystallization of polyethylene gives bunched-up lamellae with an overall spherical symmetry. The space between the lamellae contains uncrystallized amorphous polymer. These objects are called spherulites, and their radii grow linearly with time, in spite of their intricate morphological features [9]. Another remarkable feature of spheruhtes formed by linear polyethylene is that they are gigantically chiral, although the molecules are achiral. 

Dynamic mechanical property (DMP) measurements are used to evaluate the suitability of a polymer for a particular use in sound and vibration damping. Since the dynamic mechanical properties of a polyurethane are known to be affected by polymer morphology (4), it is important to establish the crystallization and melting behavior as well as the glass transition temperature of each polymer. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) was used to determine these properties and the data used to interpret the dynamic mechanical property results. 

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