Entropy-induced frozen morphology in unstable polymer blends

Late Stages of Phase Separation in a Binary Polymer Blend Studied by Rheology, Optical and Electron Microscopy, and Solid State NMR

“…When the viscosities and mobilities of the two components are similar, as in the case of a polybutadiene/polyisoprene (PB/PI) blend, 33 the coarsening does not persist for an extended period but cessation of growth occurs, in agreement with the transnodal mechanism. 34 More work on the role of the interfacial tension and the surface tension between the two phases is needed to r ≈ 0.1σ∆F η t…”

Kinetics of the droplet formation at the early and intermediate stages of the spinodal decomposition in homopolymer blends

“…Following the previous studies, [32][33][34] we shall describe all phenomena in the rescaled variables that are often used in the experiments. [12) The new rescaled time s e and rescaled distance r e are s e 18b 0 1 À b 0 s 15…”

On the mechanism of pinning in phase-separating polymer blends

“…The solution of this continuum equation ( 2.9, which was first studied by KM [15], describes the time evolution of the concentration field after a quench to χ > χ s in the unstable region [33,34]. The initial condition before the quench, corresponding to high temperature, is given by a uniform field with random fluctuations about its average value φ 0 .…”

“…The phase separation is monitored visually in real space, and quantitatively by determining the time evolution of k 1 (τ ), the first moment of the spherically-averaged structure factor [13]; this is the inverse length that is used to determine the exponent α. For the purposes of comparison with previous studies [15,34], we take χ to be related to T (K) by [37]: Results change drastically when the mesh size is reduced to ∆x = 0.5, for which the time step must be reduced to ∆τ = 0.002 to maintain numerical stability (Fig. 2).…”