4.7 Article

Thermal stability enhancement of oriented polyethylene by formation of epitaxial shish-kebab crystalline structure

Journal

POLYMER DEGRADATION AND STABILITY
Volume 195, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.polymdegradstab.2021.109771

Keywords

Polyethylene (PE); Self-assembly nucleating agent; Oriented epitaxial shish-kebab structure; Thermal stability enhancement

Funding

  1. National Natural Science Foundation of China [51773122, 51933007]
  2. International Scientific and Technological Cooperation Project of Sichuan Province [2020YFH0084]

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The introduction of self-assembly rare-earth nucleating agent (RENA) improves the dimensional/strength retention of oriented polyethylene (PE) products under high temperature long-term service, showing better physical performance and stability. With increased draw ratio, the crystalline structure of PE-RENA transitions from a hybrid oriented shish-kebab structure to a highly oriented shish-kebab structure, exhibiting enhanced thermal stability after thermal aging.
Oriented polyethylene (PE) products usually exhibit thermodynamic instability in oriented crystalline structure under high temperature during long term service. In this work, self-assembly rare-earth nucleating agent (RENA) was innovatively introduced to fabricate oriented PE and induced PE molecules to form stable epitaxial oriented crystalline structure. Compared with oriented neat PE, oriented PE-RENA showed much higher dimensional/strength retention during aging, which reached as high as 90.13%/86.46% after aging at 100 degrees C for 1000 h, exhibiting high dimensional/mechanical stability. At low draw ratio, PE-RENA exhibited hybrid oriented shish-kebab structure, for which oriented RENA assembly acted as shish structure and PE lamellae acted as kebab structure, while, after aging, new stable anisotropic shish-kebab crystalline structure formed and the crystallinity (X-c) changed slightly. At high draw ratio, highly oriented shish-kebab structure formed, most of which was retained after aging and the changes of X-c/orientation degree was insignificant, while the molecular mobility in crystalline phase/intermediate phase was weakened, exhibiting enhanced thermal stability in oriented crystalline structure. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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