Reviewer was right - these things are not related. No need for explanations.  

Smoothness and roughness is not related to amorphous fraction of the polymer membranes. It entirely depends on the pore nature of the membrane. It could be confirmed by the AFM analysis, which can give exact information on smoothness/ hardness of the membrane surface.

Hope that it helps to you.

Best regards

Tota Rajasekhar

INDIA.

Vladimir and Rajasekhar are absolutely right... But, dear Mrs. Zain, to give you a better imagination of the meaning of the glass transition temperature (Tg): The lower the Tg of a certain polymer, the softer the material will probably behave under same temperature. This corellation is often observed especially for crosslinked polymers. And the softness of a polymer might also influence the quality of the cutting surface topography of machined parts. But this won't be of interest for the manufacturing of your membranes, right?

BR, Johannes.

In the absence of compositional information, I am going to assume that you have a system that is at least two-phase in nature.  If so, then you may have a relationship between the continuous and discontinuous phases.  Think in terms of particles of phase 2 in phase 1.  This is in addition to the Tg effect already noted.

All particulate systems cluster, with the size of the cluster and its frequency increasing with concentration of the discontinuous phase.  There are two critical "points" as a function of concentration of the discontinuous phase.  [Actually more zones than points -- very hard to narrow the transitions to more than a few percentage points]

The first is in the vicinity of 15-25 volume percent and represents the onset of percolation, which is the first cluster of discontinuous particles that spans the dimensions of the film.  This would be the first zone in which microtoming might show increased roughness.  If one is trying to obtain antistatic properties, for example, the functional filler would need to exceed this percolation threshold. 

The second critical "point" is in the vicinity of 50 to 70 volume percent, and represents the region in which there is a phase conversion between the continuous and discontinuous phases.  The is called different things in different industries:  critical pigment volume concentration in the paint industry; critical filler loading in the filled plastics industry. 

The large zone for these behaviors is due to lots of details of the system beyond the current comments.  But suffice it to say that these two transitions can materially affect the appearance of microtomed sections of polymeric systems, particularly membranes. 

So I suggest that you consider your issue from a materials science perspective to see if that is playing a role in your observations.

Lou Floyd