The ability to accurately predict the rheological behavior of the blends of two incompatible polymers is critical to the polymer industry. The constitutive modeling of incompatible polymer blends requires understanding the structure and dynamics of the blends across different length scales. The polydispersity of chain length at the molecular level and nonuniformity of flow field due to dispersed domains at the mesoscopic level present significant challenges to this industrially relevant problem. This work proposes a modeling framework for linear and nonlinear rheology of industrial incompatible polymer blends with sea-island morphology. For the individual components, we adopt the Rolie-Double-Poly model and generate the relaxation spectrum from an optimized molecular weight distribution. We derive a new mixing rule without empirical parameters from the flow field analysis inside and outside the droplets. The phase interface, modeled by an ellipsoidal model, contributes to the apparent rheology only at low shear rates. Our modeling approach is verified by the shear and extensional rheology of eight polymer blends with a broad range of viscosity ratios (0.01–100). We also show that the model has the ability to predict the nonlinear rheological behaviors of incompatible polymer blends with known molecular weight distributions and phase morphology.
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See supplementary material online for optimized discrete molecular weight distributions of PP and POE and corresponding viscoelastic master curves; effects of nonlinear parameter
on the startup shear behaviors predicted by the RDP model; the relationship between the Rouse–Weissenberg number and stress overshoot; comparison between the RDP model and the Giesekus model; the distribution of droplet size of the rubber phase; damped fluctuations in transient viscosity due to the tumbling of droplets in blends with a high viscosity ratio; the effect of preshear on transient shear rheology; and blends containing long-chain branched polymer as the dispersed component.
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