Morphology Evolution in Immiscible Polymer Blends during Compounding

Polymer researchers have had a long-standing interest in understanding the evolution of blend morphology when two (or more) incompatible homopolymers or copolymers are melt blended in mixing equipment. In industry, melt blending is conducted using either an internal (batch) mixer (e.g., a Banbury mixer or a Brabender mixer) or a continuous mixer (e.g., a twin-screw extruder or a Buss kneader). There are many factors that control the evolution of blend morphology during compounding, the five primary ones being (1) blend composition, (2) rheological properties (e.g., viscosity ratio) of the constituent components, (3) mixing temperature, which in turn affects the rheological properties of the constituent components, (4) the duration of mixing in a batch mixer or residence time in a continuous mixer, and (5) rotor speed in a batch mixer or screw speed in a continuous mixer (i.e., local shear rate or shear stress). When two immiscible polymers are compounded in mixing equipment, two types of blend morphology are often observed: dispersed morphology and co-continuous morphology. Numerous investigators have reported on blend morphology of immiscible polymers, and there are too many papers to cite them all here. Some investigators (Han 1976, 1981; Han and Kim 1975; Han and Yu 1972; Nelson et al. 1977; van Oene 1978) examined blend morphology to explain the seemingly very complicated rheological behavior of two-phase polymer blends, and others (Favis and Therrien 1991; He et al. 1997; Ho et al. 1990; Miles and Zurek 1988; Scott and Macosko 1995; Shih 1995; Sundararaj et al. 1992, 1996) investigated blend morphology as affected by processing conditions. Today, it is fairly well understood from experimental studies under what conditions a dispersed morphology or a co-continuous morphology may be formed, and whether a co-continuous morphology is stable, giving rise to an equilibrium morphology, or whether it is an unstable intermediate morphology that eventually is transformed into a dispersed morphology (Lee and Han 1999a, 1999b, 2000). Let us consider the morphology evolution in an immiscible blend consisting of two semicrystalline polymers, A and B, in a compounding machine, and let us assume that the melting point (Tm,A) of polymer A is lower than the melting point (Tm,B) of polymer B.