Abstract
There has been a widespread interest in polymer alloys for the development of new polymeric materials. These materials have heterogeneous disperse multiphase structures (particles) and the practical properties such as impact strength depend mainly on these disperse structures. So, for the research and development in this area, it is important to know the most favorable disperse structure, and the method to get it. If we could predict the mixing condition which leads to the most favorable disperse structure of the polymer blends, then we could conduct an efficient research and development. It is well known that the disperse structures from the mixing of polymer melts depend mainly on the interfacial tension and the viscoelastic properties of each component.
Recently, we developed a new theory which quite accurately predicts the interfacial tension between polymer melts from their chemical structures.
Depending on this development, we also constructed an expert system that predicts the kinds of disperse structure, sizes of the dispersed particles, and the interfacial distance between the dispersed particles.
