Abstract
Abstract Rubber toughening was first developed about seventy years ago as a method of increasing the impact resistance of brittle glassy polymers. Since that time, a wide variety of techniques have been developed to produce discrete dispersions of rubber within a glassy polymer matrix. We are exploring a new route to rubber-toughen polymer through the non-equilibrium process of mechanical alloying (high-energy ball milling). Here we have blended poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) with polyisoprene (PI) (see the insets in Fig. 1 for chemical structures) and have characterized the resultant blends with Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM) in order to obtain chemical, as well as morphological, information about the blends. The STXM technique utilizes tuneable soft x-rays that are focused with a diffraction zoneplate to a microprobe of 45 nm full width at half maximum. Thin sections of the sample are placed at the microprobe and the transmitted photon intensity is measured.
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