Trisec and 3D-TREF Approach to Polymer Blend Design, 2000 Polymers, Laminations & Coatings Conference Proceedings

Wallace W. Yau, David Gillespie--Polyolefin technology has made remarkable progress in the last four decades. The market is expanding and the technical challenges today remain high. New products are being developed through new catalyst technology and by blending existing products. New resins are needed to meet the requirements of high-speed fabrication machines and market expansions into high-tech applications. Successful resin development can be achieved either by blending or by optimizing catalyst and reactor conditions. This requires strong polymer characterization support to determine polymer microstructure. To this end, GPC and TREF have become an integral part of polymer microstructural analysis. Our approaches are the following: First, we have focused on optimizing the precision of the techniques. Secondly, we added triple detector capabilities (weight fraction, molecular weight, and polymer size determination) to the systems taking a hybrid approach for the analysis of polymer microstructure. A "polymer microstructure plot" is generated that contains both the triple detector GPC and TREF results in one chart. The results presented in this way are very effective in comparing products or defining blending conditions for resin design.