Abstract
Polyamide/polyolefin blends have gained attention from the academia and the industry for several years. However, in order to optimize their properties, some drawbacks such as chemical incompatibility must be adequately overcome. This can be done by adding suitable compatibilizers. On the other hand, it is less known that suitable processing techniques may also lead to significant results. In a previous work on a low-density polyethylene/polyamide 6 (LDPE/PA6) blend, we found that the orientation due to elongational flow processing conditions could lead to an unexpected brittle–ductile transition. In this work, this phenomenon was further investigated and the attention was mainly focused on the effects that processing can have on the morphology and, as a consequence, on the final properties of a polymer blends. With regard to LDPE/PA6 blend, an important result was found, i.e., the effects on the ductility induced by the elongational flow orientation are similar to those obtained by using an ethylene-glycidyl methacrylate compatibilizer.
Highlights
Polyamide/polyolefin blends are widely investigated in the literature because of the interesting properties they can show, especially in the view of commercial applications, thanks to the possibility to produce materials with tailored features, without the need of designing new synthesis polymers.At the same time, it is known that these blends are chemically incompatible, with poor physical properties
In a previous work [10] we investigated the effect of the orientation on the mechanical properties of a low density polyethylene (LDPE)/polyamide 6 (PA6) incompatible blend
It could be stated that compatibilization is a morphology modification, which leads to the improvement of some macroscopical properties
Summary
Polyamide/polyolefin blends are widely investigated in the literature because of the interesting properties they can show, especially in the view of commercial applications, thanks to the possibility to produce materials with tailored features, without the need of designing new synthesis polymers.At the same time, it is known that these blends are chemically incompatible, with poor physical properties. A typical consequence of the incompatibility can be observed on ductility, which is strongly reduced; this occurs since the poor adhesion between the two phases constitutes a defect, which can propagate in presence of mechanical stresses and lead to premature breaking of the sample. This makes compatibilization necessary in order to achieve adequate properties [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. A decrease of elongation at break upon increasing the orientation degree was expected [11,12], the direct comparison between oriented (anisotropic) and unoriented (isotropic) blend samples showed an unexpected, orientation-induced brittle–ductile transition, which was interpreted in terms of morphological changes
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