What Is an Immiscible Blend?
Long ago someone came up with the idea of taking two polymers and mixing them together in order to get a material with properties somewhere between those of the two polymers mixed. Materials made from two polymers mixed together are called blends. But if you read the blends page, you’ll know that it’s not very often that two polymers will mix with each other. Most of the time, if you try to mix two kinds of polymers, you’ll end up with something that looks like chicken soup. Take a look at a bowl of good chicken soup, and you’ll see that it has two phases: a water phase and a chicken fat phase. The chicken fat is insoluble in water, so it forms little blobs in the soup separate form the water phase. So we say mixtures like chicken soup are phase-separated. Phase-separated mixtures are just what you get when you try to mix most polymers. But strangely enough, the phase-separated materials often turn out to be rather nifty and useful. We even have a name for them. We call them immiscible
