PLA Blended with Other Polymers

In addition to the systems discussed above, other studies documenting the miscibility of PLA with several blend partners have been conducted. Nonetheless, the literature dealing with each of these systems is scarce, and it was preferred that these were included in a different section. Blends of polyamide (PA) with PLA were recently reported by Feng et al. [159]. When these authors studied the structure and properties of blends by means of FTIR, DMTA, DSG and SEM analysis, the DSG scans showed two 7 -values located at about the glass transition temperatures of PLA and PA, and slightly shifted towards each other. This behavior 

Lin et id. [162] modified PLA with a biodegradable hyperbranched poly(ester amide) (HBP) and reported that mixtures presented lower 1 -values than the neat polymers, indicating a partial miscibility of the blends that was attributable to hydrogen-bonding interactions between the carbonyl group of PLA and the hydroxyl and/or amine groups of HBP. This component was found to act primarily as a plasticizer that improves the mechanical properties of PLA. When Zhang 

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