Properties of Highly Filled, Highly Plasticized, Semicrystalline Polymer Networks
Abstract 1. Component reactivity of ingredients such as fillers and plasticizers is significant and is measurable by a technique developed during this work. 2. The undesirable syneresis problem common to these highly plasticized materials can be controlled through adjusting equivalence ratios. Syneresis can be controlled primarily by decreasing the crystallinity of the material. 3. Changing percent crystallinity with temperature is a very important variable controlling the physical properties, i.e., ultimate properties, tearing energy, and dynamic-mechanical response. 4. The tearing energy data did not display simple amorphous behavior, and, as such, could not be shifted using a reduced variables technique such as WLF shifting. All variables were needed to represent the data. Three dimensional plotting developed previously by von Merrwall et al. was utilized to represent the data. The resulting tear-energy data exhibit the normal viscoelastic effects of rate and temperature as well as the superposition of the effects of crystallinity on the tearing energy. A decrease in tearing energy with increasing temperature is primarily due to increasing crystallinity in the samples. Plasticizer decreased the tearing energy, while filler increased the tearing energy. Filler lessened the effects of temperature and plasticizer on tearing energy. 5. Ultimate property measurements using ring samples for these model propellants revealed that these materials did not behave in a simple thermo-rheological manner, since crystallinity effects are predominant in the tensile mode. Because of crystallinity and strain-induced crystallinity, the data could not be represented by a failure envelope as proposed by Smith. The presence of plasticizer has the effect of decreasing the tensile strength, while filler tends to increase the tensile strength for the plasticized systems. 6. A model is presented to explain the high strain-to-failure behavior of these systems. Further details of this work can be found in Reference 22.