Investigating the role of oriented nucleus in polymer shish-kebab crystal growth via phase-field method

The phase-field method has been developed to simulate the shish-kebab crystal growth in polymer crystallization by introducing the oriented nucleus. With the help of this developed phase-field model, the role of oriented nucleus in polymer shish-kebab crystal growth has been investigated. It appears that the growth mechanisms of shish-kebab crystal on a preformed oriented nucleus may be attributed to epitaxial growth and lattice match. First the oriented nucleus (early shish) further grows into stable shish entity through epitaxial growth, and then lattice match supplies the sites for kebabs and epitaxial lateral growth from these sites forms the kebabs. It also has been verified that kebabs can be grown on oriented nucleus in the total absence of any flow. Therefore, with regard to flow induced shish-kebab crystal, the oriented nucleus plays a major role in the growth of shish-kebab morphology and the flow mainly helps to generate the oriented nucleus. Besides, when the nucleus possesses a rod-like profile, the kebabs are generally parallel and equidistantly distributed, and the well-defined interval between adjacent kebabs is strongly influenced by the orientation angle of the rod-like nucleus. On the other hand, when the nucleus is slightly curved and presents a thread-like profile, the distribution of kebabs on the shish is no longer equidistant and the influence of orientation angle on the kebab density becomes weak.