Modeling the Rheology of Commercial Long Chain Branched Polymer Melts

摘要

The predictions of a general "hierarchical model" for the rheology of general mixtures of linear and branched polymers are compared to experimental data for well-defined long-chain branched polymers. For a wide range of branched polymer melts, which include star-linear blends, H-polymers, and comb polymers, the predictions of the model agree well with experimental data. We apply the hierarchical model to metallocene-catalyzed polyethylenes (mPEs), in which the branched structures are generated by a Monte Carlo method based on the known reaction kinetics. The hierarchical model captures the shape of the curves of viscoelastic moduli vs. frequency of mPEs well and predicts accurately the effect of long chain branching on the linear viscoelastic properties. The quantitative agreement of the hierarchical model prediction with experimental data of well-defined long-chain branched polymers and mPEs shows that information on branching structure could be inferred from Theological measurements on combinatorial sets of mixtures of an unknown branched with different combinations of linear polymers.