RHEOLOGICAL CHARACTERZATION OF THE MOLECULAR WEIGHT AND MOLECULAR WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION OF LINEAR POLYETHYLENES

摘要

It has been known for many years that the rheology of linear single phase polymer melts depends strictly upon their molecular weight and molecular weight distribution. Recently, theoretical relationships have been developed that permit transforming rheological data into molecular weight information. Rheology has several advantages over GPC or LC in determining the molecular weight distribution of linear polymers. For one, rheology is highly sensitive to the high molecular weight tail, which is usually excluded in chromatographic separations. These fractions dominate the elasticity of the polymer melt, which greatly affects processing behavior. Generally, in order to determine the entire molecular weight distribution of a polymer, the rheological data must characterize the complete range of relaxation times between the plateau and terminal regions. In practice, such measurements are very tedious and time consuming, and can involve multiple tests run at several different temperatures, with different sets of conditions. A solution to this problem has been developed by Mead et. al. that allows incomplete rheological data to be combined with appropriate mathematical models to produce the molecular weight distribution curves. This paper reports on the transformation of the frequency dependent viscoelastic material functions to molecular weight and molecular weight distribution curves of LLDPE samples using this method. These results are compared with the molecular weight distribution curves obtained from GPC.