Effect of thermal treatment on structure and properties of polyester tire cords

Polyester and nylon are the mostly used reinforcing textile fibers in many industrial rubber applications. Now-a-days body ply of a passenger car radial is mostly made up of polyester fiber. Because of its thermoplastic nature, it undergoes some kind of thermal shrinkage during processing and vulcanization, which lead to many problems related to shape, dimension, and dimensional stability. To avoid this, polyester is subjected to thermal treatment at higher temperature. Hence, thermomechanical properties of polyester tire cords become very important. During the thermal treatment, there is not only change in shrinkage, shrinkage force, and mechanical properties but also it affects structural and morphological properties. In this work, the changes in thermomechanical properties due to heat setting have been correlated to structural and morphological changes like crystallinity, crystal size, orientation, crystal perfection, etc. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2012