Elastic Light Scattering Studies on Cold-crystallization Behaviors of Syndiotactic Polystyrene

Abstract

The cold-crystallization behavior of syndiotactic polystyrene (sPS) and its isothermal kinetics were studied by elastic scattering method in this work. It was shown that the scattering signal was very sensitive to the conformational change of sPS chains upon heating. The glass transition temperature (T g ) and cold-crystallization temperature (T c ) obtained by elastic scattering were in good agreement with those measured by DSC method. In addition, it can be clearly observed in the plot of temperature-dependent scattering intensity, there are several stages during the cold-crystallization process, i.e., nucleation phase, nucleus growth phase and secondary crystallization phase. By using isothermal scattering data and Arrhenius equation, the apparent activation energy of cold-crystallization of sPS was estimated to be 309 kJ/mol.