Recent Progress in Understanding Polymer Crystallization

Recent developments concerned with elucidating the semicrystalline structure formation in bulk polymer melts, with a focus on possibly important factors that have received less systematic attention, are reviewed. This includes the presence or absence of chain motion through the crystallites, which has a strong impact on the final crystallite thickness, and the effects of entanglements, which limit crystal growth and lower the crystallinity. From the theoretical side, interest is shown in shedding light on the thermodynamic driving forces of polymer crystallization, thus providing a theoretical background against which the kinetic limitations determine the resulting structures in experiments.