On this, the dawning of a new age in high technology, man is seeking answers to increasingly complex problems. We are routinely launching reusable vehicles into space, designing and building computers with seemingly limitless powers, and developing sophisticated communications systems using laser technology, fiber optics, holography, etc., all of which require new and advanced materials. Polymer alloys continue to provide new solutions to the materials problems, and remain an area of ever increasing research. Polymer alloys are mu1ticomponent macromolecular systems. The components may be all...

Alloy is a term commonly associated with metals and implies a composite which may be sinqle phase (solid solution) or heterophase. Whichever the case, metallic alloys generally exist because they exhibit improved properties over the base metal. There are numer ous types of metallic alloys, including interstitial solid solutions, substitutional solid solutions, and multiphase combinations of these with intermetallic compounds, valency compounds, electron compounds, etc. A similar situation exists with polymers. There are numerous types of composites, or "alloys" of polymers in existence today...

The term "alloy" as pertaining to polymers has become an increasingly popular description of composites of polymers, parti- cularly since the publication of the first volume in this series in 1977. Polymer alloy refers to that class of macromolecular materials which, in general, consists of combinations of chemically different polymers. The polymers involved in these combinations may be hetero- geneous (multiphase) or homogeneous (single phase). They may be linked together with covalent bonds between the component polymers (block copolymers, graft copolymers), linked topologically with no...