Balancing the Performance Trade-off of Polymer Blends with Heterogeneously Dispersed Nanodomains via Reactive Processing

Polymer blends are ubiquitous though there are persistent material-property trade-offs, due to the limitation of structural design. Here we report a reactive processing strategy that creates heterogeneously dispersed nano-domains (hDNs) of rubbery ethylene-acrylic ester-glycidyl methacrylate terpolymer (EGMA) in polyoxymethylene (POM) matrix. Pre-reactive blending of EGMA with poly (L-lactide) (PLLA) and subsequent melt processing with POM result in formation of the unique morphology, where PLLA serving as the leveraging forces for opposing uniform distribution via chemical bonds and macro-phase separation by physical associations. The resulting materials exhibited optimized mechanical performance impossible to be acquired with conventional counterparts. This work identifies herein innovates how reactive processing can regulate phase morphology while balancing the trade-off among toughness, ductility, strength and stiffness in multicomponent polymer blends, representing a paradigm shift in narrowing gap between structure and tailor-made property towards pilot plant scale. Polymer blends are ubiquitous though there are persistent material-property trade-offs, due to structural design. Here the authors design multicomponent polymers optimizing the material properties.