Characterization of complex polymers of poly(styrene) and poly(acrylate) by thermal field-flow fractionation with light scattering and other detection

Abstract

Polymers are an important class of materials, with applications in medicine, construction, personal care, textiles, safety, packaging, and still other fields. Their properties are derived from their chemical compositions and architectures. Advances in their synthesis have led to chemical compositions of more than one component in various arrangements and architectures that yield configurations that go beyond linear polymers to form stars, bottlebrushes, rings, dendrimers, pom-poms and others. The large sizes of polymers pose special challenges for characterization which are further complicated by the variations in sizes of polymers. Issues with the workhorse approach in polymer characterization, size-exclusion chromatography (SEC), such as its effective range, propensity to reduce sample recovery, the risk of shearing polymers apart, and its significant cost are addressed by thermal field-flow fractionation (ThFFF). In this work, other limitations such as its non-selectivity for polymer composition and the need for linear standards are more deeply investigated and addressed by ThFFF.