Isotacticity effect on crystallization and melting in polypropylene fractions: 3. Overall crystallization and melting behaviour

A set of polypropylene (PP) fractions with similar molecular masses and molecular mass distributions but different isotacticities have been investigated and their overall crystallization and crystal melting behaviours determined by differential scanning calorimetry and time resolved small-angle X-ray scattering experiments. The observations indicate that when the supercooling is high ( ΔT > 48 K), only poor and imperfect crystals can form, which are continuously annealed to more perfect crystals upon heating after isothermal crystallization. On the other hand, below ΔT = 48 K, two different crystal morphologies are recognized with their own crystallization kinetics and thermal stabilities. The Avrami treatment for the overall crystallization kinetics of these PP fractions generally reveals a low Avrami exponent ( n) compared with the literature data. The overall crystallization and crystal melting behaviour can be correlated to the crystal morphology change with supercooling, in particular to the ‘cross-hatching’ lamellar phenomenon uniquely observed in the case of PP. The isotacticity effect on the overall crystallization processes and melting behaviour are also focused upon.