Premium
Density Fluctuations during the Early Stages of Polymer Crystallization: An Overview
Author(s) -
Baert Jimmy,
Van Puyvelde Peter
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
macromolecular materials and engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.913
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1439-2054
pISSN - 1438-7492
DOI - 10.1002/mame.200700407
Subject(s) - crystallization , nucleation , materials science , crystallization of polymers , optical microscope , anisotropy , polymer , work (physics) , chemical physics , thermodynamics , optics , physics , composite material , scanning electron microscope
The present work provides a critical review of polymer crystallization studies using SALS; experimental methods, analysis techniques, observations and their relations with respect to other techniques are discussed. Furthermore, the fact that nucleation might be accompanied by large scale density fluctuations has been investigated for the flow‐induced crystallization of iPB. SALS was applied to measure density and orientation fluctuations, whereas complementary results were obtained from optical microscopy. The observations from both crystallization and melting experiments seem to indicate that the detected density fluctuations result from the presence of weakly anisotropic structures, rather than being an indication of densification before the onset of crystallization.