Quiescent and shear-induced crystallization of polyprophylenes

In this paper, the effect of shear on the flow-induced crystallization (FIC) of several polypropylenes of various macrostructures was studied using rheometry combined with polarized microscopy. Generally, an increase in strain and strain rate or decrease of temperature is found to decrease the thermodynamic barrier for crystal formation and thus enhancing crystallization kinetics at temperatures between the melting and crystallization points. Secondly, popular models based on suspension theory which are used to relate the degree of crystallinity to normalized rheological functions (such as viscosity) are validated experimentally. For this purpose, the space filling of crystals in the polarized micrographs determined from image processing was plotted as a function of normalized viscosity under various shear rates. It is found that the constant(s) of various suspension models should be dependent on the flow parameters in order for the suspension models to describe the effect of shear on FIC, particularly at higher shear rates.