Self‐nucleation behaviors of olefinic blocky copolymer/montmorillonite nanocomposites with collapsed and intercalated clay layers

The self-nucleation behavior of olefinic blocky copolymer (OBC) / organically modified montmorillonite (OMMT) nanocomposites with a novel collapsed clay structure (c-OMMT) was studied and compared with that of the nanocomposites with an intercalated clay structure (OBC/i-OMMT). Their behaviors appear different in three temperature domains, Domain I (DI) in which the polymer is completely melted and only the heterogeneous nuclei are present, Domain II (DII) in which only self-nucleation occurs and Domain III (DIII) where both self-nucleation and annealing take place. As the OMMT loading increases, the boundary temperature of DI and DII (TIII) shifts to lower temperature and DII becomes narrower. For the OBC/c-OMMT nanocomposites, the TIII or TIIII (the boundary temperature of DI and DIII) can be lower than the end melting temperature ( ) and leads to appearance of a subdomain of DI, DI′, in which the self-nuclei of un-melted fragmental crystals exist but the following crystallization is still initiated by c-OMMT. DII may even disappear at high c-OMMT loadings. By contrast, the TIII of the OBC/i-OMMT nanocomposites is always approximate to or higher than the . DII does not disappear and no DI′ is observed for the OBC/i-OMMT nanocomposites. The nucleation efficiency of c-OMMT is also evidently higher than that of i-OMMT. These results verify that the c-OMMT has stronger nucleation ability than i-OMMT at the same OMMT loading. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2015, 132, 41771.

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