Kinetics and morphologies of viscoelastic phase separation

Abstract

In this paper, the effects of relaxational bulk modulus and the average composition of polymers on the viscoelastic phase separation are investigated in detail. It is found that there are two typical morphologies, i.e., moving droplet phase and phase inversion, and the relaxation of the dynamical asymmetry and the amplification of the concentration fluctuation are responsible for the appearance and evolution of different morphologies of viscoelastic phase separation. It is found that, for the viscoelastic phase separation, the scattering function has two peaks. The growth exponents of the main and the secondary peaks in the late stage are almost the same and ∼0.6, which also agrees with the experimental observations. On the other hand, the growth exponent of the secondary peak increased from ∼0.42 to ∼0.66 with increase of φ0 from 0.275 to 0.4, in the intermediate stage.