Influence of the efficacy of interfacial modification on the coarsening of cocontinuous PS/HDPE blends during quiescent annealing

This article studies the quiescent annealing of three different cocontinuous polystyrene/high-density polyethylene blends modified with two types of interfacial agents of widely different efficacies. Quantitative analysis of phase growth was obtained using mercury porosimetry. In a previous work, it was shown that one of these modifiers, a symmetrical diblock copolymer, has a high affinity for the interface and demonstrates virtually no micelle formation prior to saturation of the blend interface. The other modifier, a hydrogenated SEBS of 70/30 composition, forms micelles at elevated concentrations of modifier. In this study, it is shown that the cocontinuous phase size grows linearly without modifier, whereas the addition of both interfacial modifiers significantly suppresses the PE/PS phase coarsening and results in nonlinear phase growth behavior. The effect of the diblock copolymer on suppressing coarsening, however, is much more effective than that for the triblock case clearly supporting the tendency toward micelle formation for that latter modifier. In the case of unmodified PE/ PS, the driving force for capillary pressure effects is so high that it is the capillary instability phenomena that dominate the coarsening and hence result in a linear growth of pore size with annealing time. When interfacial modifiers are added, the influence of reduced interfacial tension and lower pore size polydispersity significantly diminishes both capillary pressure effects and capillary instability phenomena. In that case, capillary pressure becomes the main rate determining step resulting in a nonlinear dependence of pore size with annealing time. It is shown that both the viscosity of the phases and the temperature of annealing can strongly influence coarsening behavior at low levels of interfacial modifier. Under all those conditions, however, nonlinear phase growth for the partially compatibilized. system was maintained. These results clearly show that careful quantitative coarsening experiments using mercury porosimetry can be used as a tool to analyze the efficacy of interfacial modifiers for highly continuous or cocontinuous systems. (c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.