Session D40 - Poster Session I.
POSTER session, Monday afternoon, March 12
Exhibit Hall, Washington State Convention Center
In a commercial polyethylene (HDPE) highly drawn at 295 K, a distinct morphological component intermediate to the crystalline and the almost isotropic amorphous phases has been identified by solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). This intermediate component accounts for nearly 25% of the material bulk, exceeding the amorphous fraction at the highest draw ratios. In the neat isotropic material examined for reference, the NMR-derived composition shows excellent agreement with other techniques. 13C NMR isotropic chemical shifts of the intermediate component, whose signal was selected using an “inverse T1,C filter”, prove chains of nearly all-trans conformations; the line width indicates significant disorder. Reduction of dipolar couplings and the chemical-shift anisotropy show fast rotations of 30 – 50 deg. amplitude around the chain axes. The degree of orientation of the chain axes is high. Spin diffusion experiments suggest that the intermediate component consists mostly of extended chain bundles closely associated with the amorphous phase (tie-molecule bundles ?).