화학공학소재연구정보센터
Journal of Polymer Science Part B: Polymer Physics, Vol.35, No.5, 763-770, 1997
Metastable Liquid-Liquid and Solid-Liquid Phase Boundaries in Polymer-Solvent-Nonsolvent Systems
In general liquid-liquid demixing processes are responsible for the porous morphology of membranes obtained by immersion precipitation. For rapidly crystallizing polymers, solid-liquid demixing processes also generate porous morphologies. In this study, the interference of both phase transitions has been analyzed theoretically using the Flory-Huggins theory for ternary polymer solutions. It is demonstrated that four main thermodynamic and kinetic parameters are important for the structure formation in solution : the thermodynamic driving force for crystallization, the ratio of the molar volumes of the solvent and the nonsolvent, the polymer-solvent interaction parameter, and the rate of crystallization of the polymer compared to the rate of solvent-nonsolvent exchange. An analysis of the relevance of each of these parameters for the membrane morphology is presented.