Crystallization and chain conformation of semicrystalline and amorphous polymer blends studied by wide-angle and small-angle scattering

We examine the crystallization and chain conformation behavior of semicrystalline poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) and amorphous poly(vinyl acetate) (PVAc) mixtures with wide-angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD), small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), and small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) experiments. For blends with PEO weight fractions (wt(PEO)) greater than or equal to 0.3, below the melting point of PEO, the WAXD patterns reveal that crystalline PEO belongs to the monoclinic system. The unit-cell parameters are independent of wt(PEO). However, the bulk crystallinity determined from WAXD decreases as wt(PEO) decreases. The scattered intensities from SAXS experiments show that the systems form an ordered crystalline/amorphous lamellar structure. In a combination of WAXD and SAXS analysis, the related morphological parameters are assigned correctly. With the addition of amorphous PVAc, both the average amorphous layer thickness and long spacing increase, whereas the average crystalline layer thickness decreases. We find that a two-phase analysis of the correlation function from SAXS, in which the scattering invariant is linearly proportional to the volume fraction of lamellar stacks, describes quantitatively the crystallization behavior of PEO in the presence of PVAc. When wt(PEO) is close to 1, the samples are fully spaced-filled with lamellar stacks. As wt(PEO) decreases from 1.0 to 0.3, more PVAc chains are excluded from the interlamellar region into the interfibrillar region. The fraction outside the lamellar stacks, which is completely occupied with PVAc chains, increases from 0 to 58%. Because the radius of gyration of PVAc with a random-coil configuration determined from SANS is smaller than the average amorphous layer thickness from SAXS, we believe that the amorphous PVAc chains still persist with a random-coil configuration even when the blends form an ordered structure. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.