Design of Crystal Growth Dimensionality in Synthetic Wax: The Kinetics of Nonisothermal Crystallization Processes.

Abstract

The demand for the development of multifunctional materials in emerging technologies has stimulated intensive research on the control of crystallization processes in numerous scientific and engineering fields. In this article, we examine the kinetics of nonisothermal melt crystallization in synthetic wax using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) supported by polarized optical microscopy (POM) to describe crystallization modes in a multicomponent molecular system. We detected the macroscopic growth of three crystal phases and the formation of two crystal phases as a transformation from a disordered crystal mesophase into an ordered crystal. To characterize individual crystal phase formation, we examine the activation energy evaluated by isoconversional analysis and utilize the Ozawa and Mo methods to determine the kinetic details of the crystal growth from the isotropic phase. Our investigation reveals the possibility of the design of crystal growth dimensionality as three-dimensional spherulitic-like, two-dimensional rodlike, and one-dimensional needle-shaped crystal forms of shorter n-alkanes by controlling the solidification pathway of long-chain n-alkanes and the interplay of the thermodynamic and kinetic mechanisms of crystallization.