Acceleration of Formation of Shish under Flow by Addition of Irregular Shaped Particles

We have shown that the shish was formed from the oriented melt composed of the elongated chains caused by dust particles within the melt via bundle typed nucleation under flow with low shear rate (γ=5s(-1)). This implies that dust particles effectively cause the elongation of chains within the melt. In this work, we observed the crystallization of polypropylene added with irregular shaped particles under shear flow by means of polarizing optical microscope. We prepared various shaped particles such as confetti-like, spherical and rock-like. We found that the size and asymmetric shape of additive particles play an important role for the acceleration of formation of shish.