9505545 Walker The International Junior Investigator and Postdoctoral Fellows Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an eight-month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. Lynn M. Walker to work with Professor Paula Moldenaers at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. The blending of polymeric materials during processing is a rapidly growing industrial practice with the goals of capitalizing on specific pure component properties and lowering processing costs. Blending offers an almost infinite range of final properties, the potential to utilize recycled and high volume materials and the ability to use existing processing equipment without costly alterations. Unfortunately, the blending of polymeric materials is not fully understood at a fundamental level, making the robust a priori prediction of final properties almost impossible. This limits the widespread use of heterogeneous blends, especially those containing complex and specialized polymeric materials. However it is the unique properties of these complex polymeric materials that offer the most potential gain in blending processes. The purpose of this research is to gain a fundamental grasp of the flow-induced behavior observed in one special group of blends. Specifically, the PI will study heterogeneous blends containing a matrix of flexible polymer and inclusions of liquid crystal polymer (LCP), and perform several rheological and rheo-optical experiments on a model blend. The results will provide quantitative estimates of the macroscopic and microscopic parameters used in present models for heterogeneous blends. ***
