Electrical conductivity of anionic graft copolymers obtained by radiation grafting of 4-vinylpyridine onto poly(vinyl chloride)

Abstract

The electrical conductivity of the graft copolymers, obtained by direct radiation grafting of 4-vinylpyridine onto pure and plasticized poly(vinyl chloride) PVC films was investigated under various temperatures and applied potentials. The electrical conductivity of such graft copolymers increased as the temperature was elevated, for a given applied potential and degree of grafting. The degree of grafting, the additives in PVC, and the quaternizing agent have an influence on the electrical behaviour of the grafted films. The main feature of the activation energy of the graft copolymers was its very low values and two different activation energies were found for each copolymer based on the applied potential. The values of the activation energy for MeI-quaternized plasticized PVC film were almost twice those for the MeI-quaternized pure one. When using HCl as quaternizing agent, however, values of the activation energy for both grafted pure and plasticized PVC films were almost the same at a given applied potential.