| Synthetic polymers are human made polymers which have wide range of applications in day to day life. Out of all polymers polyethylene is the commonly used plastic. Previous studies have proved that polyethylene produced under normal gravity conditions produced crystals with defects which effects the materials tensile strength and stability produced from these defective crystals. Our main objective of this experiment is to produce polyethylene under reduced gravity conditions and study its thermal, physical and microscopic characteristics using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Polarized light microscopy (PLM). 1% polyethylene solution was prepared by adding 1gm of PE in 100ml of toluene and is subjected to simulated microgravity (&mgr;g) using a microgravity reactor in which rotational force reduces the gravity acting on PE solution. PE films were prepared from standard gravity (1g) and microgravity solution rotated for different intervals of time like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24 h and analyzed using DSC, FTIR and PLM. DSC results suggest that microgravity PE films has more crystallinity and molecular interactions because the transition temperature and enthalpy changes were higher for microgravity PE films than standard PE films. It also revealed that as time of rotation increased crystallinity increases then decreased and again increased and reached a maximum value at 24 h rotated time period. This was verified by spectral analysis using FTIR by analyzing A/B (730/725) values of CH2 rocking region of all the standard and microgravity PE films where A and B are height of peaks at 730 and 725cm -1 wave numbers respectively.;Finally the results were confirmed by PLM images. They proved that crystal size and orientation of microgravity PE films is higher than standard PE films and also crystal size of 8 h to 16 h rotated PE is less than 2 h to 6 h rotated PE and increased from 18 h to 24 h rotated PE. |
