Efficiency of graft copolymers at stabilizing co-continuous polymer blends during quiescent annealing

This work was aimed at studying the efficiency of graft copolymers at stabilizing the co-continuous morphology of polystyrene (PS)/polyamide 6 (PA6) blends during quiescent annealing. A series of graft copolymers with PS as backbone and PA6 as grafts, denoted as PS-g-PA6, with different molecular structures and compositions were used as compatibilizers. The co-continuous domain size of the blends without PS-g-PA6 increased almost linearly with annealing time. The addition of the PS-g-PA6 not only narrowed down the composition range of co-continuity of PS/PA6 blend but also slowed down and even stopped completely the coarsening of the co-continuous morphology during the quiescent annealing. Moreover, the efficiency of PS-g-PA6 depended very much on its molecular structure and/or composition. For graft copolymers with similar backbone and graft chain number, the longer the grafts, the higher their stabilizing efficiency. For a given backbone/graft composition, graft copolymers having fewer and longer grafts were more efficient at compatibilizing and stabilizing the co-continuous morphology.