Paper Title
Effect of Iron Loading on Quiescent Crystallization of Syndiotactic Polypropylene/Iron Composites

Abstract
Rheology can be used as a tool to examine the crystallization kinetics of the polymers and polymer composites and it provide more accurate results than the commonly used conventional techniques like differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) when the crystallization kinetics are slow. Crystallization occurs when crystalline polymers are cooled below its thermodynamic melting point temperature. In the start of this process, there is a gradual change in the mechanical response of the material from the liquid to the solid state, which is due to the change at microstructure level of the polymer and polymer composites. This is one of the main characteristics of the rheological methodology that sets it apart from the conventional DSC method. In the present work, we used both rheological and differential scanning calorimetric techniques to perform both isothermal and non-isothermal crystallization experiments on a range of syndiotactic polypropylenes/Iron composites with varying doses of Iron contents in order to investigate the crystallization behavior of the materials. The objective of this work is to explore the effect of Iron contents on the crystallization behavior of the syndiotactic polypropylene/Iron composites and to couple the rheological methods to more conventional techniques such as Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC). Time sweep test at constant heating rate of 40 oC/minutes were used to investigate the crystallization kinetics using Atomic Rheumetric Expansion System (ARES). Crystallization behavior was found strongly dependent on the Iron contents of syndiotactic polypropylene/Iron composites. Both melting point (Tm) and crystallization temperatures (Tc) were found to increase with increase in Iron contents. Excellent agreement is found between the results obtained by both the rheological and differential scanning calorimetric (DSC) methods. Keywords - Atomic Rheumetric Expansion System(ARES),Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), Polymer Composites, Quiescent Crystallization Kinetics