SAXS and WAXD study of periodical structure for polyacrylonitrile fiber during coagulation

Small angle X‐ray scattering (SAXS) and wide angle X‐ray diffraction (WAXD) were adopted to investigate the formation and development of high order structure within polyacrylonitrile (PAN) precursor during coagulation. The scattering signal came from the microvoids and long period structure was separated reasonably by the analog computation method of decomposition of the one‐dimensional profile. Based on the established methodology, the statistic parameters of long period structure, such as length of the long period structure, crystalline region and amorphous region, were obtained by the analysis of correlation function. The results indicated that during the coagulation, the length of long period of the nascent coagulated fiber was 56.1 nm (meridional direction) and 35.6 nm (equatorial direction), respectively. The evolution of the long period during the coagulation was also discussed by combining WAXD data. With the processing of coagulation, the long period was decreased since the crystallinity increased. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.