MULTIFRACTAL ANALYSIS - A NEW METHOD FOR THE CHARACTERIZATION OF THE MORPHOLOGY OF MULTICOMPONENT POLYMER SYSTEMS

It has been demonstrated that use of polymeric emulsifiers under usual processing conditions in the melt state is a powerful technique for preparing polymer alloys. Digitized representation of optical micrographs of thin sections of blends of a low-density polyethylene and polystyrene (20 wt % PE-80 wt % PS) containing 2 and 5 wt % of two hydrogenated polybutadiene-polystyrene block copolymers exhibit different degrees of homogeneity as well as different morphological structures which can be studied by a multifractal analysis. We show how these differences are reflected in the f (alpha) spectrum of singularities which can be obtained by a box counting method in the canonical approximation. We have found a correlation between the f (alpha) curves and the mechanical properties of the corresponding samples: the samples which area the less multifractals have the best mechanical properties.