Hydrogen–hydrogen intermolecular structure of polyethylene in the melt

Three polyethylene samples, which differed in their degree of deuteration, were studied in neutron diffraction isotopic substitution (NDIS) experiments at 428 K. These results were complemented at small wavevectors by small angle neutron measurements. The intermolecular hydrogen–hydrogen (HH) structure function, hHH(Q), was obtained without recourse to intramolecular structure models, as demonstrated in a prior report. The PE experimental results are compared to computer simulation results for the alkanes C100 at 509 K and C44 at 350, 400, and 450 K. The small temperature dependence of the HH intermolecular radial distribution functions, gHH(r) for C44 indicates that the differences observed between the PE, C100, and C44 (450 K) results are, for the most part, not due to just temperature differences. It is shown that the string model, an analytic result from an integral equation theory of polymers (PRISM), can account approximately for the overall shape of the gHH(r) functions, and that this overall shape is dependent on the radius of gyration of the molecule. Further analysis shows that there are two other contributions to gHH(r), both of which are independent of chain length to first order. The first is due to chain–chain packing, and the second is due to local HH intermolecular correlations. These results are significant because they demonstrate that hHH(Q) is a useful function for studying intermolecular polymer structure, which has been shown to underpin phase behavior in polyolefin blends.