Molecular weight distribution of polymer is one of the important factors affecting mechanical properties of polymer and its processability. Molecular weight distributions are typically measured by GPC (Gel Permeation chromatography). However, these me...
Molecular weight distribution of polymer is one of the important factors affecting mechanical properties of polymer and its processability. Molecular weight distributions are typically measured by GPC (Gel Permeation chromatography). However, these measurements are sometimes not available because of solubility problem for commercial polymers such as Kevlar, Teflon, PE(polyethylene), and PP(Polypropylene). Furthermore, cost aspects, for polymers like PP, GPC measurement sometimes requires a lot of cost compared with rheological determination of MWD.
To overcome these limitations and problems of GPC measurement of molecular weight distribution, in this study, we developed a method calculating the molecular weight distributions from rheological properties. Quadratic mixing rule derived from double reptation theory is adopted and a phenomenological model, composed with parameters having molecular weight dependence, is used to describe linear viscoelasticity of monodisperse polymer melts. Also, we used Fixed-point iteration method originally developed for determining the relaxation time spectrum from dynamic moduli data to get the information of molecular weight distribution from the mixing rule.