Structure development of polypropylenes of varying stereoregular form and tacticity in melt spinning, tubular blown film extrusion and injection molding

Polypropylene has become an important commercial thermoplastic since the isotactic form was first synthesized in the 1950's by Natta and his coworkers using Ziegler's catalysts. In recent years, new types of polypropylenes different than the existing Ziegler-Natta polypropylenes have also been commercially available through the application of the improved catalysts, i.e. metallocene. These include isotactic polypropylenes possessing lower stereoregularities and syndiotactic polypropylene.; In this dissertation, we study structure development in processing these new polypropylenes and conventional high tacticity isotactic polypropylenes. We begin with the study of formation of structure in crystallization from quiescent melts and investigation of the crystallization kinetics of these polypropylenes. These are carried out by both isothermal and non-isothermal experiments. Then, we turn to the study of structure development during processing of these polymers. This is carried out in three major polyolefin processing processes: (i) melt spinning, (ii) tubular blown film extrusion and (iii) injection molding.; The crystal structure and orientation of fabricated samples were characterized by wide angle X-ray diffraction (WARD), birefringence and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).; We seek to correlate the formation of structure and orientation development with processing conditions (e.g. stress field and cooling rate) and material characters (e.g. tacticity and crystallization rate) and find processing-structure-properties relationships in processing these polymers.