Excellent tensile toughness was obtained for the ternary
PLA/EMA-GMA/PEBA blends. As shown in Figure 3, all the
ternary blend formulations showed higher elongation compared
to the neat PLA and binary blends. The elongation at break
increased with the increasing content of EMA-GMA in the
ternary blend. The PLA/EMA-GMA/PEBA (70/20/10) blend
showed the highest elongation of 72.7%, which is almost 20
times higher than that of the neat PLA. Interestingly, it was
clearly evident that the impact strength of the ternary blends
did not follow the same trend as the elongation. Tremendous
increase in the impact strength was achieved in the case of
super tough PLA/EMA-GMA/PEBA (70/20/10) blend with a
value of 410 J/m exhibiting partial impact break behavior. Yet,
the impact strength of the PLA/EMA-GMA/PEBA (70/10/20)
and PLA/EMA-GMA/PEBA (70/15/15) blends was found to
be even lower than that of PLA/EMA-GMA (80/20) binary
blend. These interesting results indicated the materials exhibit
different deformation mechanism under different loading
conditions of tensile and impact test. It is well-known that
the tensile testing is usually performed at a constant low strainrate
condition. However, the impact testing is carried out at
remarkably high speed.19,45 Under the high speed, the notched
impact test samples will be very sensitive for the interfacial
adhesion. In the PLA/EMA-GMA (80/20) binary blend and
PLA/EMA-GMA/PEBA (70/20/10) blend, the different
phases showed better interfacial adhesion compared with
other formulations. Consequently, they showed higher impact