A frequency-dependent effective medium model for the rheology of crystallizing polymers.

ABSTRACT: The rheology of crystallizing polymers is critical to polymer processing, but our current understanding of how crystallinity affects rheology during crystallization is lacking. The challenge is twofold: first, we must measure rheology simultaneously with crystallinity, and then we must develop models that can describe those measurements as well as prior phenomenological observations. Here, we further develop a generalized effective medium model to describe the frequency-dependent shear modulus of a crystallizing polymer. Through a simple model system, we show that the percolation transition in the effective medium model recovers the relaxation dynamics of a critical gel with a relaxation spectrum that can be approximated as the power mean of the initial melt and final semicrystalline mater

SUBMITTER: Kotula A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7543060 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature