International Postdoctoral Fellows Program: Rheology and Morphology of Immiscible Blends of Flexible and Liquid Crystal Polymers

9505545沃克国际初级研究员和博士后研究员计划使美国科学家和工程师能够在国外进行3至24个月的研究。该项目的奖项提供了联合研究的机会，并提供了使用国外独特或互补的设施、专业知识和实验条件的机会。该奖项将支持Lynn M.Walker博士在比利时鲁汶大学与Paula Moldenaers教授合作进行为期八个月的博士后研究访问。聚合物材料在加工过程中的混合是一种快速增长的工业实践，其目标是利用特定的纯成分属性并降低加工成本。混合提供了几乎无限范围的最终性能，有可能利用回收和大容量材料，并能够使用现有的加工设备，而不需要进行昂贵的更改。不幸的是，聚合物材料的混合在基本层面上没有得到充分的理解，这使得对最终性质的稳健的先验预测几乎是不可能的。这限制了非均相共混物的广泛使用，特别是那些含有复杂和特殊聚合物材料的共混物。然而，正是这些复杂的聚合物材料的独特性质在混合过程中提供了最大的潜在收益。这项研究的目的是从根本上掌握在一组特殊的共混物中观察到的流动诱导行为。具体地说，PI将研究含有柔性聚合物基质和液晶聚合物(LCP)夹杂物的非均质共混物，并对模型混合物进行几次流变和流变光学实验。这些结果将为目前用于非均相共混的模型中使用的宏观和微观参数提供定量估计。***

9505545 Walker The International Junior Investigator and Postdoctoral Fellows Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an eight-month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. Lynn M. Walker to work with Professor Paula Moldenaers at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. The blending of polymeric materials during processing is a rapidly growing industrial practice with the goals of capitalizing on specific pure component properties and lowering processing costs. Blending offers an almost infinite range of final properties, the potential to utilize recycled and high volume materials and the ability to use existing processing equipment without costly alterations. Unfortunately, the blending of polymeric materials is not fully understood at a fundamental level, making the robust a priori prediction of final properties almost impossible. This limits the widespread use of heterogeneous blends, especially those containing complex and specialized polymeric materials. However it is the unique properties of these complex polymeric materials that offer the most potential gain in blending processes. The purpose of this research is to gain a fundamental grasp of the flow-induced behavior observed in one special group of blends. Specifically, the PI will study heterogeneous blends containing a matrix of flexible polymer and inclusions of liquid crystal polymer (LCP), and perform several rheological and rheo-optical experiments on a model blend. The results will provide quantitative estimates of the macroscopic and microscopic parameters used in present models for heterogeneous blends. ***