pps proceeding - Abstract Preview
pps proceeding
Symposium: S09 - Reactive Processing
Keynote Presentation
 
 

The use of a reactive compatibilizer-tracer to probe reactive polymer blending processes

JI Wei-Yun (1), ZHANG Cai-Liang (1), HU Guo-Hua (2)*, FENG Lian-Fang (1), HOPPE Sandrine (2)

(1) Zhejiang University - Zhejiang - China, (2) CNRS - University of Lorraine - Lorraine - France

Most polymer pairs are immiscible. It is common practice to use a block or graft copolymer known as a compatibilizer to promote the dispersion of the one of the phases in the other and stabilize it. Such a compatibilizer can be either premade or generated in-situ during the blending process upon reacting two reactive polymers at the interfaces. The latter case, called reactive compatibilization, is mostly practiced in industries. It is very challenging to investigate a reactive compatibilization process because both mixing and interfacial reactions between reactive polymers are highly coupled. Most importantly, the amount of the in-situ formed copolymer is often too low to be determined in a relatively accurate manner, especially for an industrial scale process. For this reason, we propose a concept called reactive compatibilizer-tracer. It bears reactive groups capable of reacting with its counterpart upon forming a copolymer in-situ, and fluorescent labels allowing determining very small amounts of the in-situ formed compatibilizer. This paper reports on an unusual and highly undesirable phenomenon which may occur during a reactive polymer blending process. When a critical amount of the in-situ formed compatibilizer is reached, the dispersed phase domains undergo a drastic increase in size with a further slight increase in the amount of the compatibilizer, instead of continuing to decrease or leveling off as one may expect. This phenomenon is revealed owing to the concept of reactive compatibilizer-tracer. It indicates that a reactive compatibilizer can be a very efficient compatibilizer under certain thermomechanical conditions and may become inefficient under other ones. It also shows how challenging it may be to design and optimize the molecular architecture of a reactive compatibilizer as a function of thermo-mechanical conditions under which a reactive blending system is processed.