A phenomenological modification of rheological models for concentrated two-phase systems: application to a thermoplastic/thermoset blend

Internal Reorganization of Agglomerates as an Explanation of Energy Dissipation at Very Low Strain for Heterogeneous Polymer Systems

“…In particular, the occurrence and the level of a secondary plateau on the storage modulus at low frequency is considered to be the trace of a finely and well‐dispersed viscoelastic solid phase in a molten matrix. Though the occurrence of a secondary plateau on the storage modulus at low frequency can be well explained in the frame of a filler network, a plateau on the loss modulus has also been reported in many cases for polymer blends such as acrylonitrile/butadiene/styrene (ABS)1, 2 or other systems containing a hard dispersed phase at high concentration3, 4 or for polymers containing fillers or nanofillers 5–8. In a previous paper,9 we have shown that the viscoelastic behavior of highly filled polymer melts in oscillatory shear can be well modeled by the Leonov model 10.…”