1 Polymer Blend Compounding and Processing （1共混聚合物复合加工）.pdf

j1 1 Polymer Blend Compounding and Processing James L. White and Sug Hun Bumm 1.1 Introduction and Early Studies of Blending Humankind has been mixing together different materials since the dawn of written history to produce products with improved engineering properties. The term “Bronze Age” (which began around 3000 BC) indicated the blending of tin into copper to improve its mechanical performance. Concrete was also introduced by the ancients with similar purposes in mind. The polymer industry as we know it dates only from the first part of the nineteenth century, where the major industrial polymers aside from wood were natural rubber (cis-1,4-polyisoprene) from Brazil, gutta-percha (trans-1,4-polyisoprene) from Singapore and Malaya from the 1840s, and natural fibers, including cellulose (cotton, linen) and protein (wool) fibers and leather. Many of the earliest patents involved coating fabrics and leather with natural rubber [1–6]. There was a gradual realization in this period of the usefulness, in terms of improving the properties or rubber, of introducing solid particulates [7– 10] or chemicals such as sulfur and its compounds [10–13], which caused vulcanization/crosslinking. It was only with the commercial appearance of gutta-percha in about 1845 [14–17] that there were investigations of polymer blends (gutta-percha with natural rubber). These were reported in patents of C. Hancock [17, 18], A. Parkes [13] and W. Brockedon and T. Hancock [19] in 1846. All of these inventors knew each other, Two were brothers (C. Hancock and T. Hancock) and two others (Brockedon and Parkes) were at the time business colleagues of the above T. Hancock. The patents cited above generally cite one or more of the others. This all took place in or near London, England. The mixing processes are usually not critically discussed in these e