Simulated morphological landscape of polymer single crystals by phase field model

Prediction of Flow Effect on Crystal Growth of Semi-Crystalline Polymers Using a Multi-Scale Phase-Field Approach

A multi-scale phase-field approach, which couples the mesoscopic crystallization with the microscopic orientation of chain segments and macroscopic viscoelastic melt flow, is proposed to study how the crystal growth of semi-crystalline polymers is affected by flows. To make the simulation feasible, we divide the problem into three parts. In the first part, a finitely extensible nonlinear elastic (FENE) dumbbell model is used to simulate the flow induced molecular structure. In the second part, formulas for estimating the density, orientation and aspect ratio of nuclei upon the oriented molecular structure are derived. Finally, in the third part, a massive mathematical model that couples the phase-field, temperature field, flow field and orientation field is established to model the crystal growth with melt flow. Two-dimensional simulations are carried out for predicting the flow effect on the crystal growth of isotactic polystyrene under a plane Poiseuille flow. In solving the model, a semi-analytical method is adopted to avoid the numerical difficult of a "high Weissenberg number problem" in the first part, and an efficient fractional step method is used to reduce the computing complexity in the third part. The simulation results demonstrate that flow strongly affects the morphology of single crystal but does not bring a significant influence on the holistic morphology of bulk crystallization.

A Phase Field Technique for Modeling and Predicting Flow Induced Crystallization Morphology of Semi-Crystalline Polymers

Flow induced crystallization of semi-crystalline polymers is an important issue in polymer science and engineering because the changes in morphology strongly affect the properties of polymer materials. In this study, a phase field technique considering polymer characteristics was established for modeling and predicting the resulting morphologies. The considered crystallization process can be divided into two stages, which are nucleation upon the flow induced structures and subsequent crystal growth after the cessation of flow. Accordingly, the proposed technique consists of two parts which are a flow induced nucleation model based on the calculated information of molecular orientation and stretch, and a phase field crystal growth model upon the oriented nuclei. Two-dimensional simulations are carried out to predict the crystallization morphology of isotactic polystyrene under an injection molding process. The results of these simulations demonstrate that flow affects crystallization morphology mainly by producing oriented nuclei. Specifically, the typical skin-core structures along the thickness direction can be successfully predicted. More importantly, the results reveal that flow plays a dominant part in generating oriented crystal morphologies compared to other parameters, such as anisotropy strength, crystallization temperature, and physical noise.

Investigating the role of oriented nucleus in polymer shish-kebab crystal growth via phase-field method

The phase-field method has been developed to simulate the shish-kebab crystal growth in polymer crystallization by introducing the oriented nucleus. With the help of this developed phase-field model, the role of oriented nucleus in polymer shish-kebab crystal growth has been investigated. It appears that the growth mechanisms of shish-kebab crystal on a preformed oriented nucleus may be attributed to epitaxial growth and lattice match. First the oriented nucleus (early shish) further grows into stable shish entity through epitaxial growth, and then lattice match supplies the sites for kebabs and epitaxial lateral growth from these sites forms the kebabs. It also has been verified that kebabs can be grown on oriented nucleus in the total absence of any flow. Therefore, with regard to flow induced shish-kebab crystal, the oriented nucleus plays a major role in the growth of shish-kebab morphology and the flow mainly helps to generate the oriented nucleus. Besides, when the nucleus possesses a rod-like profile, the kebabs are generally parallel and equidistantly distributed, and the well-defined interval between adjacent kebabs is strongly influenced by the orientation angle of the rod-like nucleus. On the other hand, when the nucleus is slightly curved and presents a thread-like profile, the distribution of kebabs on the shish is no longer equidistant and the influence of orientation angle on the kebab density becomes weak.