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The external electric field effects on the morphology of phase separation in a mixture of liquid crystal/flexible polymer
Author(s) -
Hong Ke,
Zhang Hongdong,
Yang Yuliang
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of applied polymer science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.575
H-Index - 166
eISSN - 1097-4628
pISSN - 0021-8995
DOI - 10.1002/app.10956
Subject(s) - electric field , binodal , liquid crystal , materials science , morphology (biology) , phase (matter) , polymer , phase diagram , field (mathematics) , field strength , crystal (programming language) , composite material , chemical physics , chemistry , optoelectronics , magnetic field , physics , organic chemistry , mathematics , quantum mechanics , biology , computer science , pure mathematics , genetics , programming language
In this article, the morphologies of phase separation in the mixtures of small molecular liquid crystal and flexible polymers with or without being subjected to the external electric field are preliminarily studied by polarized light microscope. It is found that the characteristic “Swiss cheese” morphology can always be observed for the case of zero field strength. For the case of 1.2 V/μm field strength, it is found that the external electric field make the binodal curves of the phase diagrams shift to higher temperature and the “Swiss cheese” morphology can never be observed. However, the domain growth rate is highly accelerated due to the fact that the electric field oriented liquid crystal phase excludes the polymer coils strongly. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 86: 250–258, 2002