Wednesday, November 7, 2007
510al

A Morphological Study On The Solid-State Polymerization Of Bisphenol A Polycarbonate

Yuesheng Ye and Kyu Y. Choi. Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Maryland, Stadium Drive, Bldg 090, College Park, MD 20742

Solid-state polymerization (SSP) is a post-melt polycondensation process that has been widely used to further increase the molecular weight of condensation polymers such as bisphenol A polycarbonate (BPA-PC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) at a temperature well above the polymer's glass transition temperature but below its melting point. Low molecular weight amorphous prepolymer prepared by melt polymerization is usually partially crystallized before SSP. Previous experimental and modeling studies indicated that reaction conditions such as the particle size of prepolymer, the mole ratio of reactive end group and crystallinity in prepolymer play important roles in the process of SSP. It is also noted that morphology has a significant effect on SSP. Understanding the relationship between morphological properties and SSP is important both for scientific and practical reasons. However, much less attention has been brought into the morphological study on SSP. Our recent experimental results show that the conditions of solvent-induced crystallization have a strong impact on the morphological structures of prepolymer, which further affects the reaction kinetics and molecular weight increase of SSP greatly. In this paper, we present interesting structures of partially crystallized polycarbonate at SSP. Our morphological study provides a insight into the reaction mechanism, kinetics for the process of SSP. More detailed experimental results will be presented at the meeting.