Critical size and formation mechanism of secondary nuclei in melt- crystallized polylactide stereocomplex crystals
Critical size and formation mechanism of secondary nuclei in melt- crystallized polylactide stereocomplex crystals
复制标题
熔融结晶聚丙交酯立体络合物晶体中二次核的临界尺寸和形成机制
DOI:
10.1021/acs.macromol.2c02494
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发表时间:
--
期刊:
影响因子:
5.5
通讯作者:
Jun Xu
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Zhiqi Wang;Ranlong Duan;Xuan Pang;Rongling Wu;Baohua Guo;Jun Xu
Revealing the molecular mechanism and determining the length scale of the rate-limiting ordering process have been a challenge in the field of polymer crystallization. Previously, we proposed a theory to determine the size of critical nuclei in single-component crystals from the variation of nucleation kinetics with different dilution ratios. Here, we further extend this theory to polylactide (PLA) stereocomplex crystals (SCs) consisting of poly(l-lactide) and poly(d-lactide). By diluting onlyl-lactide units or bothl-lactide andd-lactide units via random copolymerization, the number ofl-lactide units and that of two types of units in a critical secondary nucleus were obtained. The results show that a critical secondary nucleus of an SC bulk crystal consists of 22–27l-lactide units and the same number ofd-lactide units when crystallized from melt at temperatures ranging from 140 to 170 °C. These repeating units form two poly(l-lactide) stems and two poly(d-lactide) stems. The four stems in a secondary nucleus of SC are chosen from approximately three to four chains. According to the number of chains, at most one-third of PLA chains has once adjacent re-entry folding in the secondary nuclei of SC crystallized from melt. These results provide rich information on the ordering process during the melt crystallization of SC crystals and are beneficial for understanding the crystallization mechanism.