Physical aging of cyclo olefin copolymer (COC)

Abstract

The physical aging behaviour of the cyclo olefin copolymer (COC) has been investigated in this paper by using low temperature annealing in differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) measurements. The data of recovered enthalpies was fitted by means of Petrie-Marshall (PM), Cowie-Ferguson (CF) or Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts (KWW) form equation in describing the enthalpy relaxation. We have found that the COC sample has a stretched exponential factor near 1.0 (beta = 0.98 +/- 0.02) at the annealing temperature range. The apparent activation energy (EH) of COC aging obtained by using the Petrie/Marshall (PM) analysis method is about 1521.7 +/- 150 kJ/mole. That is substantially higher than 308 50 kJ/mole for bisphenol-A polycarbonate, 407.4 kJ/mole for poly (vinyl methyl ether) and 1192 kJ/mole for polystyrene, but close to 1520 kJ/mole for polyterafluoroethylene (PTFE).