The kinetics of melt intercalation of poly(propylene)/montmorillonite nanocomposites was studied by a rheological approach. The experimental sample was elaborately prepared to investigate the whole intercalating process. The intercalation process was demonstrated by the changes of the viscoelastic response with annealing time. The development of the relative volume fraction of intercalated tactoids was obtained from the rheological characterization. The apparent diffusivities was etermined and the activation energy of melt intercalation was found to be about 80

Polymer chain coils with entanglement is a crucial scale of structures in polymer materials since their relaxation times are matching practical processing times. Based on the phenomenological model of polymer chain coils and a new finite element approach, we have worked out a computer software including solver, pre and post processing modules, and developed a digital analysis technology for the morphology of polymer chain coils in flow fields (DAMPC). Using this technology we may simulate the morphology development of chain coils in various flow fields, such as simple shear flow, elongational flow, and any complex flow at transient or steady state. The applications done up to now show that the software predictions are comparable with experimental results.

The traditional retraction of the deformed drop method (DDRM) to determine the interfa-cial tension is reformulated to relax the limit the small deformation assumption. The kernel of the new formalism is the calculation of the velocity gradient on the vertex of the ellipsoidal drop. Two models were used for such calculations: the Jackson and Tucker model [J Rheol 47:659 682] and the Yu and Bous-mina model [J Rheol 47:1011 1039]. The method can be used either in the retraction of shear deformed drop, or in the retraction of elongated drops produced by the breakup of a long thread. Comparison with experimental results of the literature showed that conversely to the clas-sical DDRM, good accuracy is ob-tained when the new modeling for the determination of interfacial ten-sion is used both under small and large deformations.