Quantitative rheological evaluation of phase inversion in two-phase polymer blends with cocontinuous morphology

Abstract

The present work is focused on the rheological properties of two-phase polymer blends in the phase inversion region. A large number of PS/PMMA- and PSAN/PMMA-blends has been investigated in order to establish a rheological criterion which allows the quantitative determination of the phase inversion concentration φPI by rheological means. Three rheological criteria based on the viscous and elastic blend properties such as maximum of dynamic viscosity η′, slope of G′, and maximum of G′ at a constant evaluation frequency have been tested. By correlating the rheological results to data from quantitative morphological analysis we could prove that the chosen rheological criteria are differently suitable for the determination of φPI. It has turned out that the G′ criterion is the most robust and most suitable one yielding an excellent correlation with morphological data. Based on these findings we propose a new simple equation for the prediction of φPI-values.