Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, Vol.82, No.6, 1239-1251, 2004
Distributions of crystal size from DSC melting traces for polyethylenes
Melting curves, obtained by differential scanning calorimetry, are used to estimate crystal size distributions. The proposed theoretical analysis is applied to different types of polyethylene, including highdensity polyethylene (HDPE), metallocene catalyzed linear low-density polyethylenes (m-LLDPE), blends of m-LLDPEs, and Ziegler-Natta catalyzed LLDPEs (ZN-LLDPE). Theoretical predictions are in agreement with experimental results. A generalized melting temperature equation successfully predicts the melting temperatures of all the LLDPEs, although it was initially proposed for homogeneous copolymers with excluded comonomers. A new definition of the heat of fusion for pure crystals is proposed. This heat of fusion can be calculated from the average crystal size or the crystal size number distribution.
Keywords:crystal size number distribution;linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE);differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)