This paper addresses the compatibility, morphological characteristics, crystallization, physicomechanical properties and thermal stability of the melt mixed EMA/NBR blends. FTIR spectroscopy reveals considerable physical interaction between the polymers that explain the compatibility of the blends. DSC results confirm the same (compatibility) and reveals that NBR hinders EMA crystallization. Mechanical and thermal properties of the prepared EMA/NBR blends notably enhance with increasing the fraction of EMA in the blends. Morphology study exhibit the dispersed particles in spherical shape in the nanometer level. Swelling and oil resistance study have also been carried out in details to understand the performance behaviour of these blends at service condition

EMA-NBR has been explored to be a potential thermoplastic elastomer blend having good thermal stability as well as oil resistance property. The present investigation reports the optimization of process parameters for the novel polymer blends based on poly(ethylene-co-methyl acrylate) (EMA) and poly(acrylonitrile-co-butadiene) rubber (NBR) with criteria based on the statistical design of experiment (Taguchi L9 orthogonal array). In this case, the polymer blends were prepared by changing the polymer blending conditions such as mixing temperature, mixing time and rotor speed as per Taguchi's L9 orthogonal array. Optimization of the process parameters was carried out based on the physicomechanical properties such as tensile strength, elongation at break, hardness, and tensile impact strength of the resulting EMA/NBR blend. Each processing parameter has been optimized from the experimental data, which are converted into signal-to-noise ratio. The standard statistical technique of analysis of variance result was used to evaluate the proportional role of the different control variables. It has been found that the mixing temperature play very significant role trailed by rotor speed and mixing time in controlling droplet matrix morphology of the EMA/NBR blends. Predominantly, these factors affect the size of the NBR domain and its distribution in the EMA matrix, which in turn have a notable contribution to the physicomechanical properties of the blends. By the optimization of processing conditions, the NBR matrix domain size greatly decreases, leading to significant improvement in physicomechanical properties of the EMA/NBR blends.