Retardation of cold flow in immiscible rubber blends by tailoring their microstructures |
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| Authors: | Dandan Liu Aihua He |
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| Affiliation: | Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Olefin Catalysis and Polymerization, Key Laboratory of Rubber‐Plastics (Ministry of Education), School of Polymer Science and Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, China |
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| Abstract: | Cold flow is a well‐known characteristic and also an unresolved drawback for uncured rubber materials. In this paper, a simple approach of retarding the cold flow of cis‐1,4‐polybutadiene rubber (BR) elastomer is reported by controlling the phase separation and crystallization that occurs in immiscible BR/trans‐1,4‐polyisoprene (TPI) blends. The BR/TPI blends showed an untypical phase diagram below 150 oC. Upon crystallization the amorphous BR facilitates the nucleation of TPI. The higher the BR content is, the less the surface roughness of the TPI crystals, and then a larger dendritic pattern that resulted from the cold flow of BR was observed in the microstructure. BR/TPI blends with the highest resistance to cold flow were obtained by optimizing the composition and thermal treatment in such a way that small soft amorphous BR domains were entrapped in the rigid TPI crystalline phase. It is expected that this study could provide a simple way for the prevention of cold flow of rubber materials. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry |
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| Keywords: | cold flow microstructure immiscible rubber blends phase diagram |
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