The thermomechanical degradation of blends made from polypropylene and polystyrene, with or without compatibilizer, was studied using an internal mixer coupled to a torque rheometer. The blends processed without compatibilizer presented regular and expected results regarding torque reduction, with evidence of chain scission. The blends processed with the block copolymer of styrene and butadiene...

Newly coined words pose problems for natural language processing systems because they are not in a system’s lexicon, and therefore no lexical information is available for such words. A common way to form new words is lexical blending, as in cosmeceutical, a blend of cosmetic and pharmaceutical. We propose a statistical model for inferring a blend’s source words drawing on observed linguistic pr...

On the basis of a heuristic characterization of intentional blending as a tripartite word-formation process, this paper discusses a variety of case studies concerned with the effects of similarity and recognizability on the formation of blends. More specifically, the case studies focus on (i) the degree of similarity between the two source words that are blended (on different levels of linguist...

The influences of short chain branching (SCB) and molecular (Mw) weight of low density polyethylene (LDPE) on the solid state properties of polypropylene (PP)-LDPE blends were investigated by mechanical and thermal techniques. DSC analysis of all blends exhibit a double melting peak at all compositions studied thus suggesting that both PP and LDPE crystals exist separately in the solid state. I...

Phase separation in polymer blends is an important process. However, the compositions of the coexisting phases can only be predicted by numerical methods. We provide simple analytical expressions which serve as good approximations for the compositions after phase separation of binary homopolymer blends. These approximations are obtained by a stationary dynamics approach: we calculate the compos...

--This research is aimed to investigate experimentally the performance and exhaust emission characteristics of a direct injection (DI) diesel engine when fuelled with blends of conventional diesel fuel and ethanol, blends of rice bran methyl ester with ethanol, blends of diesel and rice bran methyl ester over the entire range of load on the engine. The experimental results showed that the highe...

Although better means to model the properties of bulk heterojunction molecular blends are much needed in the field of organic optoelectronics, only a small subset of methods based on molecular dynamicsand Monte Carlo-based approaches have been hitherto employed to guide or replace empirical characterization and testing. Here, we present the first use of the integral equation theory of molecular...

A polymer blend is a mixture of two or more polymers that have been blended together to create a new material with different physical properties. Generally, there are five main types of polymer blend: thermoplastic–thermoplastic blends; thermoplastic–rubber blends; thermoplastic–thermosetting blends; rubber– thermosetting blends; and polymer–filler blends, all of which have been extensively stu...

Background: Significant amount of research, both experimental and numerical, has been conducted to study the mechanical behaviour of biodegradable polymer PL(L)A due to its wide range of applications. However, mechanical brittleness or poor elongation of PL(L)A has limited its applications considerably, particularly in the biomedical field. This study aims to study the potential in improving th...