Evaluation of imbedded fiber retraction phenomenological models for determining interfacial tension between molten polymers

In this work, the interfacial tension for several polymer pairs, namely polypropylene/polystyrene (PP/PS), PP/polycarbonate (PC), PP/polyamide 6 (PA-6) and low density polyethylene (LDPE) and ethylene vinyl alcohol copolymer (EVOH) was evaluated as a function of temperature using the imbedded fiber retraction method (IFR). Two phenomenological models were used and compared to infer the interfacial tension from the evolution of the imbedded fiber back into a sphere: [Carriere CJ, Cohen A, Arends CB. J Rheol 1989;33:681–9. [1] and Tjahjadi M, Ottino JM, Stone HA. AIChE J 1994;40:385–94. [2]]. It was shown that Carriere et al.ʹs model overestimates the value of interfacial tension whereas Tjahjadi et al.ʹs model leads to results that corroborate the ones obtained using other experimental methods. A method to further increase the accuracy of Tjahjadi et al.ʹs model was proposed. Using this method the interfacial tension for the different polymer pairs studied was evaluated and shown to decrease linearly with increasing temperature.