pps proceeding - Abstract Preview
pps proceeding
Symposium: S03 - Injection Molding and Micromolding
Poster Presentation
 
 

Rapid Crystallization of Bisphenol A Polycarbonate Induced Synergistically by Pressure and Flow

Zhang xixi (1), Li Zhongming (1)*

(1) College of Polymer Science and Engineering, Sichuan University - Chengdu - China

Crystallization of long polymer chains has been widely studied in the past decades, due to its significant interests in polymer industry. Crystallization of polymers always involve conformation ordering, which is considered as the rate-limiting step of polymer crystallization. For bisphenol-A polycarbonate (BAPC), a typical engineering plastic, long chains are usually consisted of rigid rod segments, so that BAPC shows a strikingly slow crystallization rate. Here, greatly rapid crystallization kinetics of bulk BAPC was realized under pressure and flow, e.g. ca. 25% crystallinity was achieved under 100 MPa and 42.8 s-1 in only 60 min, which was significantly faster than that for BAPC quiescently crystallizing at atmosphere pressure, ca. 10^5 min to achieve the crystallinity that our work have. It is plausible that pressure condensed the melt system, coupled with flow, shortening the crystallization induction period immensely. Meanwhile, flow-induced oriented molecular chains crystalized rapidly, compared with those unoriented and relaxed chains which just could evolve into amorphous part within short isothermal period (60 min in this work). The experiment conditions in this study, including pressure and flow, was analogous to actual polymer processing situation. Therefore, the current work shed light on a promising way to structure the micromorphology of BAPC products and optimize their comprehensive performance. Key Words: Bisphenol A Polycarbonate; Pressure; Flow-induced crystallization