Richard Beckerbauer

Chain entanglement in homopolymers, copolymers and terpolymers of methyl methacrylate, styrene and N-phenylmaleimide

Abstract Chain entanglement in poly (methyl methacrylate), polystyrene, poly poly( N -phenylmaleimide), poly(methyl methacrylate- stat -styrene), poly(methyl methacrylate- stat - N -phenylmaleimide) and poly(methyl methacrylate- state -styrene- stat - N -phenylmaleimide) is studied in the melt by dynamic viscoelastic spectroscopy. It is shown that the plateau modulus is equal to the storage modulus at the minimum of loss tangent. The plateau modulus and the entanglement molecular weight are found to obey the geometric mean relationship with respect to composition, i.e. log G 0 N = ∑ v j log G 0 N j and log M e = ∑ v j log M e j , where G 0 N is the plateau modulus, M e the molecular weight between entanglement points, v j the volume fraction of comonomer j , G 0 N j the plateau modulus for the homopolymer of j and M e j the entanglement molecular weight for the homopolymer of j . The G 0 N and M e of homopolymers and copolymers may also be predicted by group additivity method.