Smart blending technology enabled by chaotic advection

Polymer blending has been typically regarded as a mixing process rather than a structuring process so polymer blends and composites are not necessarily optimized with regard to structure, properties, and composition. In this article, a new smart blending technology is described whereby melt components and solid additives are more controllably organized into micrometer‐scale and sub‐micrometer‐scale shapes and arrangements to improve properties or impart functionality to extruded plastics. Chaotic advection is an enabling recent subfield of fluid mechanics for smart blending. It provides a method to controllably stretch and fold melt domains and evolve a multilayered structure leading to derivative morphologies, or indirectly manipulate solid additives. Recent advances in fluid mechanics have thereby been implemented to reconsider how blending is done. A variety of structured plastic materials are producible with a single smart blending device with no device alterations. Several examples and their improved physical properties are shown or discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Adv Polym Techn 25:152–169, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/adv.20073