Abstract
Melting behavior of a series of polyether-polyester block copolymers with low ether contents was studied. Significant melting-reorganization-remelting was suggested by means of differential scanning calorimetry. The equilibrium melting temperature of the copolymers was obtained by using the Hoffman-Weeks extrapolation. It has been found that the use of the on-set melting temperature for the Hoffman-Weeks plots is less reliable than the use of the corrected peak melting temperature. Copolymerization of polyetheramides with polyesters leads to a significant melting temperature suppression for the polyester crystal. We hypothesize that the locations of the junction points between blocks can be treated as chain ends for the crystallizable polyester blocks: the polyether-polyesters grow to form extended chain-like crystals with lamellar thickness limited by the polyester block length. For comparison, the nonlinear Hoffman-Weeks treatment, recently proposed by Marand, has also been applied to examine the behavior of melting temperature depression. Although the T m o obtained from nonlinear extrapolation is much higher than the T m o obtained from the Hoffman-Weeks extrapolation, similar trend regarding the composition dependence of T m o have been found.