Morphological study by TEM on uniaxially oriented thin films of PBT

We prepared uniaxially oriented thin films of poly(butylene terephthalate) (PBT) by applying shear strain to the melt and studied their resulting morphology by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and could show visually that stacked-lamellar structures are formed in aromatic polyesters. On the basis of crystallographic consideration, we assigned each of the recognized stacked-lamellar structures to a shish-kebab structure or a part of it. In addition, we successfully demonstrated that in one shish-kebab structure all or almost all kebabs (namely, lamellae) have a same crystallographic orientation.