Citation: Jian Hu, Rui Xin, Chun-Yue Hou, Shou-Ke Yan, Ji-Chun Liu. Direct Comparison of Crystal Nucleation Activity of PCL on Patterned Substrates[J]. Chinese Journal of Polymer Science, ;2019, 37(7): 693-699. doi: 10.1007/s10118-019-2226-z shu

Direct Comparison of Crystal Nucleation Activity of PCL on Patterned Substrates

Jian Hu ^a ,
Rui Xin ^a ,
Chun-Yue Hou ^a ,
Shou-Ke Yan ^a,, ,
Ji-Chun Liu ^b

a.
Key Laboratory of Rubber-Plastics, Ministry of Education/Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Rubber-plastics, Qingdao University of Science & Technology, Qingdao 266042, China
b.
College of Chemical Engineering and Pharmaceutics, Key Laboratory of Polymer Science and Nanotechonology, Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang 471003, China

Corresponding author: Shou-Ke Yan, skyan@qust.edu.cn
Received Date: 24 December 2018
Revised Date: 9 January 2019
Accepted Date: 1 January 2018
Available Online: 27 February 2019

A sample containing different regions with poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL), oriented polyethylene (PE), and oriented isotactic polypropylene (iPP) films in contact with glass slide has been prepared to be observed in the same view field in an optical microscope and the crystallization of PCL in different regions during cooling from 80 °C down to room temperature at a rate of 1 °C·min⁻¹ was studied. The results showed that the crystallization of PCL started first at the PE surface and then at the iPP surface, while its bulk crystallization occured much later. This indicates that though both PE and iPP are active in nucleating PCL, the nucleation ability of PE is stronger than that of iPP. This was due to a better lattice matching between PCL and PE than that between PCL and iPP. Moreover, since lattice matching existed between every (hk0) lattice planes of both PCL and PE but only between the (100)_PCL and (010)_iPP lattice planes, the uniaxial orientation feature of the used PE and iPP films resulted in the existence of much more active nucleation sites of PCL on PE than on iPP. This led to the fact that the nucleation density of PCL at PE surface was so high that the crystallization of PCL at PE surface took place in a way like the film developing process with PCL microcrystallites happened everywhere with crystallization proceeding simultaneously. On the other hand, even though iPP also enhanced the nucleation density of PCL evidently, the crystallization of PCL at iPP surface included still a nucleation and crystal growth processes similar to that of its bulk crystallization.
- Poly(ε-caprolactone),
- Polypropylene,
- Polyethylene,
- Epitaxy,
- Heterogeneous nucleation
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