Non-isothermal crystallization kinetics of poly(ethylene terephthalate)/mica composites

The non-isothermal crystallization kinetics of pure poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), PET/mica and PET/TiO2-coated mica composites were investigated by differential scanning calorimetry with different theoretical models, including the modified Avrami method, Ozawa method and Mo method. The activation energies of non-isothermal crystallization were calculated by Kissinger method and Flynn-Wall-Ozawa method. The results show that the modified Avrami equation and Ozawa theory fail to describe the non-isothermal crystallization behavior of all composites, while the Mo model fits the experiment data fair well. It is also found that the mica and TiO2-coated mica could act as heterogeneous nucleating agent and accelerate the crystallization rates of PET, and the effect of TiO2-coated mica is stronger than that of mica. The result is further reinforced by calculating the effective activation energy of the non-isothermal crystallization process for all composites using the Kissinger method and the Flynn-Wall-Ozawa method.