| Surface interactions govern physical behavior at polymer interfaces. The first part of this dissertation focuses on surface interactions and the adhesion between PET and gelatin, two surfaces that would not normally adhere with each other. However, by plasma-treating the PET, the two materials can be joined. The fracture energy of this PET/gelatin interface was measured using the asymmetric double cantilever beam (ACDB) technique and it was determined that increasing the treatment time and power of the plasma on PET increased the fracture energy of the interface. Additionally, due to the hydroscopic nature of gelatin, higher relative humidity during testing also increased the interfacial fracture energy. The second part of the dissertation examines surface interactions in polymer blends.; Thermoplastic blends enjoy large-scale commercial appeal for both engineering and economic reasons. Blends can be tuned to improve various materials properties, such as elastic modulus or impact resistance. Although blends offer many advantageous benefits, the thermodynamics of these blends are not fully understood, since each particular blend has its own behavior and morphology based on processing conditions. Even more complicated morphologies could be obtained by adding filler particles.; The main interest of this area of research is the formation of co-continuous morphologies by adding particles in a blend of two homopolymers. In our system, one of the homopolymers coated the particles. At very high particle concentrations, the colloidal particles facilitated the transport of aqueous solutions. This research explored the role of particle concentration in the blends, as well as the role of concentration of the homopolymer that wets the particles. In order to study the morphology and determine the percolation threshold, the resulting microstructures were imaged in real space using techniques such as transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and confocal fluorescence microscopy. A nearest-neighbor counting technique and Minkowski functionals were applied to TEM micrographs to determine if 3-D percolation could be predicted from 2-D micrographs. The nearest-neighbor counting technique was successful in meeting this goal, whereas the Minkowski functionals were a better morphology descriptor. |
