Morphological Characterization of PE Blown Films by Atomic Force Microscopy

Abstract

AbstractThe properties of blown polyethylene (PE) films depend on various factors, including crystallinity, morphology, and orientation, in addition to chemical composition. It has been shown that the optical properties are strongly influenced by surface morphology. In this work, non-contact atomic force microscopy (AFM) and polarized light microscopy (PLM) were used to visualize surface and bulk morphology. Various techniques, such as surface and line roughness, surface and line fractal dimension, pair-correlation function and nearest neighbor distance distribution function, are employed to quantify the description of morphology and to compare the morphological characteristics of a number of polyethylene (PE) films of commercial interest. A comprehensive quantitative analysis of surface topography has been performed. The co-monomer of the PE resins was found to play a significant role in the formation and the orientation of spherulite-like domains. The film cross-section microstructure has been evaluated qualitatively by using both AFM and PLM. However, quantitative analysis of bulk morphology cannot be obtained due to knife effects.