Thermodynamic study on phase equilibrium of epoxy resin/thermoplastic blends

Influence of the Copolymer Content on the Miscibility, Phase Behaviour and Morphology of a DGEBA/Polystyrene/Styrene‐co‐Maleic Anhydride Ternary Blend

“…Finally, the comparison in Figure 2(c), between binary and ternary systems, also points out that miscibility improves when the copolymer is added, causing a decrease of about 10 degrees and diminishing the area of the two-phases region under the curves. This experimental behaviour has been modelled by using a recent theoretical approach based on the Flory-Huggins lattice theory [10,[30][31][32] and takes into account the concentration and temperature dependences of the binary interaction parameters (x ij and e ij ) as well as an empirical entropy correction. [33,37,40,41] For a general ternary solvent(A)/polymer(B)/polymer(C) system, the Gibbs free energy change of mixing, the chemical potential for each component when two phases (g ¼ a and b) are in equilibrium, as well as the equations to calculate the volume fractions for each component in both phases, f g i , have been derived and published recently [10] and can be perfectly adapted to the present system formed by epoxy resin (A)/polymer (B)/copolymer (C).…”

“…(For ternary systems: These results are in agreement with previous studies where copolymers of different chemical nature were assayed. [27,32] To understand the reason of the improvement of miscibility by the presence of the copolymer, it is necessary to focus our attention on the microstructural level. It is well known that some copolymers can self-organize to form well-ordered micellar structures, both in solution and in solid state.…”

“…[9,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] In order to explain morphologies and properties of blends, it is necessary to describe the phase separation process from a thermodynamic viewpoint. For this reason, the experimental results have been fitted with a formalism based on the classical Flory-Huggins lattice model [30][31][32][33][34][35][36] by using interaction parameters depending on both temperature and composition, x(T,f). [37,38] The aim of this paper is to study the influence of different variables such as blend composition, chemical nature of the copolymer, and MA (comonomer) content in the copolymer on the epoxy resin miscibility and phase behaviour.…”

Anomalous ductility in thermoset/thermoplastic polymer alloys

“…Most experimental studies on such alloys have been limited to rheological behavior 11 or phase behavior. 12,13 No computational/theoretical studies have yet explored the properties of thermoset/thermoplastic alloys. We begin by considering here the effect of linear polymer fraction, G l , on mechanical behavior of such alloys.…”