Time-resolved FTIR study of crystallization behavior of melt-crystallized poly(phenylene sulfide)

The crystallization behavior of melt-crystallized poly(phenylene sulfide) (PPS) was studied using time-resolved Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy measurements. The 1073-cm(-1) amorphous band was chosen for characterizing the crystallization feature of PPS. The melt-crystallization kinetics suggested three-dimensional crystal growth for the primary crystallization and one-dimensional crystal growth for the secondary crystallization in the case of low supercooling, while a deviation from these occurred with increasing supercooling. The time-resolved FTIR measurement was highly correlated with differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) measurements and further exhibited some fine details concerned with the microstructural feature of PPS, such as heterogeneity of the amorphous phase not only above T-g, but also below T-g. A novel method was suggested to calculate the rigid amorphous fraction in terms of the increase in slope of the absorbance variation with temperature at T-g. These calculated results were also found to be correlated to those obtained by DSC.