A quantitative description for the optical properties of crystalline polymers applied to polyethylene

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Abstract
A quantitative model which described the microscopic and macroscopic refractive index properties of uniaxially oriented crystalline polymers has been extended in relation to molecular bond polarizabilities in this work. Application of this extended modeling methodology in analyzing measured refractive index data for a series of unoriented and oriented samples of linear polyethylene provided Δ = 0.0585 and Δ = 0.194 as the most probable crystalline and noncrystalline intrinsic birefringences for samples exhibiting spherulitic morphology. With these intrinsic birefringences, noncrystalline orientation functions were determined from the optical measurements coupled to the model and the results compared to values obtained from infrared measurements. This comparison of noncrystalline orientation functions, as well as from low density polyethylene reported by other investigators, provided experimental justification for our modeling methodology to examine the possibility of changing intrinsic birefringences for polyethylene as a function of orientation and morphology. The results of this examination demonstrated that values for Δ = 0.0585 and Δ = 0.12 should be used for both low and high density polyethylene samples oriented above the spherulitic to fibrillar transition region.

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