Phase behavior actuating morphology and rheological response of polybutadiene/polyisoprene blends under small amplitude oscillatory shear

The morphology evolution and the corresponding linear viscoelastic behavior of the phase-separating polybutadiene (PB)/low vinyl content polyisoprene (LPI) blend have been investigated by phase contrast optical microscopy (PCOM), small-angle light scattering (SALS) and rheometry. Two kinds of structure evolutions and rheological responses have been observed. It is found that the co-continuous structure generally gives a power law behavior of the dynamic storage modulus versus frequency and the coarsening of co-continuous structure leads to a decrease of the storage modulus. For the droplet-matrix structure, a platform modulus is observed at the mediate frequencies, followed by the typical terminal relaxation behavior of storage modulus at the extremely low frequencies. The decreasing platform modulus and increasing terminal modulus with the growth of droplets are observed and can be well interpreted by the simplified Palierne model. The platform modulus and terminal modulus at a given frequency are found to be scalable with the phase separation time. Besides, the characteristic relaxation time and domain size of the droplets have been obtained by rheology. And it seems that the rheologically determined droplet dimensions are consistent with the ones determined by PCOM and SALS.