Utracki L.A., Weiss R.A. (ed.). Multiphase Polymers: Blends and Ionomers

ACS Symposium Series No 395; American Chemical Society, Washington, DC 1989. - 514 p.The field of multiphase polymers is too broad for any single volume. Two of the more important topics within the field from the perspectives of both applications and scientific challenges are polymer blends and ionomers. The high level of interest in these areas is evidenced by the explosive growth of the literature and patents devoted to these subjects. With this in mind, we felt that a book devoted to recent advances in these fields was justified.
The chapters in this volume represent the current trends in the fields of polymer blends and ionomers, including materials development, characterization, theory, and processing. They are grouped into six sections: the first three are concerned with polymer blends and interpenetrating networks and the latter three with ionomers. Although immiscible polymer blends and ionomers share a common feature in that both exhibit more than a single phase, a major difference between the two systems involves the dispersed phase size. For blends, this is generally of the order of micrometers and may be detected optically. Ionomers, however, are microphase-separated with domain sizes of the order of nanometers. Thus, blends and ionomers represent two extremes of the subject of multiphase polymers. In this book, the reader will observe similarities as well as differences in the problems associated with these materials and the approaches used to study them. In addition, we expect that the reader will find many parallels with multiphase systems that are not discussed here, such as block copolymers and liquid crystalline polymers.