Modifying an amorphous polymer to a fast crystallizing semi-crystalline material by copolymerization with monodisperse amide segments

Abstract

Segmented block copolymers of polysulphone with monodisperse amide segments were synthesized by a melt and a solution polymerization method. Both triblock and multiblock copolymers were prepared. The length of the difunctional polysulphone was varied from 2000 to 20,000 g/mol. The monodisperse amide segment was the tetra-amide T6T6T based on terephthalic acid (T) and hexamethylene diamine (6) units. The main goal of this work was to study if the high Tg amorphous polysulphone could be modified to a high Tg semi-crystalline PSU-T6T6T copolymer. The copolymers were characterized by viscosity measurements, NMR, FTIR, MALDI-TOF, DSC, and DMA. Depending on the amide concentration in the copolymers the T6T6T melting temperatures ranged between 220 and 270 °C and thus the crystallization window was small 50–100 °C. From the FTIR results, it was revealed that the crystallinity of the T6T6T segments in the copolymer could be very high, up to 92–97%. The T6T6T has crystallized out into nanoribbons with a high aspect ratio. These high Tg semi-crystalline copolymers had a high dimensional and solvent resistance. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 48: 63–73, 2010