Unveiling the origin and the morphological mechanism of multiple melting behavior in PEEK with in-situ μ-beam SAXS and fast chip calorimetr

In this experiment we are trying to understand the phenomenon of double melting in semi-rigid chain polymers such as poly(ether ether ketone), (PEEK). As in previous works the focus was laying on the limits of recrystallization of polymer chains during fast heating using μ-beam WAXS, this time we are going to use a dedicated μ-beam SAXS experiment to understand the direct mechanism of the multiple melting behavior that, until now, could only be accessed for crystallization temperatures above the recrystallization limit addressed with conventional heating methods in SAXS and AFM. To achieve this we are going to exploit the exceptionally high flux of the ID13 with its low divergence micro beam setup. We will extend the standard WAXS/SAXS setup to a pure SAXS configuration to get better resolved SAXS information allowing to extract detailed morphology parameters using the interface distribution function approach.