The impact of the thermal annealing conditions on the structural properties of polylactic acid fibers

Polylactic acid (PLA) is a prominent biomaterial for plentiful applications in medicine and industry. The main goal of using this new material is replacing polymers based on petrochemical. Different thermal and structural properties of PLA fibers were studied after the thermal treatment using two different conditions (taut and free ends). Different techniques were used to study the effect of the thermal treatment conditions on the crystallinity and molecular orientations for PLA fibers such as differential scanning calorimetry technique, X-ray diffraction technique, and polarized light microscopy. The impact of the thermal annealing treatment on both the crystallinity and crystalline orientation was calculated. In case of taut ends thermal annealing treatment method, the measured parameters were higher than the case of free ends thermal annealing condition. The oriented segment relaxation due to the thermal annealing results an increase in the crystallinity values, but it does not indicate that the molecular orientation will be high. Results showed that the orientation of crystal and crystallinity was improved after thermal treatment. The taut conditions of annealing show significant improvement of crystallinity than free conditions.