Influence of molecular characteristics on overall isothermal melt-crystallization behavior and equilibrium melting temperature of syndiotactic polypropylene

Overall isothermal melt-crystallization and subsequent melting behavior of metallocene-catalyzed syndiotactic polypropylene resins of various molecular weights were investigated using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) technique. Two sets of molecular weight range were synthesized with two different metallocene catalyst systems. The kinetics of the overall isothermal melt-crystallization process was analyzed based on various macrokinetic models, i.e. the Avrami, Malkin and Urbanovici–Segal models. The effective activation energy describing the overall isothermal crystallization process over the crystallization temperature range studied was estimated based on an Arrhenius approximation of the obtained Avrami crystallization rate constants. The equilibrium melting temperature for each of these resins was estimated based on the linear and non-linear Hoffman–Weeks extrapolative methods.