A Twenty First Century Toolbox for Characterizing Next Generation Extrusion Coating Resins, 2007 European PLACE Conference

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Dow’s Plastics Characterization organization supports Dow’s plastics manufacturing and research organizations globally. One of the key challenges this group has is to continue to develop tools to deliver the necessary molecular structural data on resins with higher and higher levels of structural complexity. It is the purpose of this talk to introduce three new tools that Dow has developed to help support the development of new extrusion coating resins. The first tool is called 2-dimensional GPC-ATREF or Cross Fractionation. This technique is uniquely able to measure the molecular weight as a function of short chain branching distribution or it can measure comonomer content as a function of molecular weight distribution. The next tool is high temperature Asymmetrical Flow, Field Flow Fractionation or AF4. This technique is able to measure with very high sensitivity the small amount of high molecular weight polymer found in certain types of polyolefins. The final analytical tool to be discussed is Molecular Topology Fractionation or MTF. This technique fractionates polymers based on their long chain branching structure. Combined these three characterization techniques give us the potential to develop much better structure property correlations than was possible previously. In addition, these new correlations should allow us to design polyolefin resins with higher performance.