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Report No xxxx - Instytut Fizyki Jądrowej PAN

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THE GLASS TRANSITION TIME SCALE AND CONFIGURATIONAL<br />

ENTROPY IN POLYMERS: AN EXPERIMENTAL MOLECULAR<br />

VIEW<br />

J. E. Wolak, X. Jia, Jeffery L. White<br />

Department of Chemistry, <strong>No</strong>rth Carolina State University, Campus Box 8204, Raleigh,<br />

<strong>No</strong>rth Carolina 27695-8204<br />

We report direct experimental observation of local conformational dynamics in a<br />

polymer chain at the calorimetric glass transition temperature T g . Variable-temperature 2D<br />

solid-state exchange NMR, at natural abundance, reveals segmental dynamics in pure<br />

polyisobutylene (PIB) occurring on a timescale of several seconds over the T g range observed<br />

by DSC (203-208 K). To our knowledge, this is the first direct observation of molecular-level<br />

conformer interchange (trans-trans/trans-gauche/gauche-gauche) at the caloric glass<br />

transition temperature. Our results provide a chronologically accurate and pedagogically<br />

advantageous demonstration of molecular processes during a polymer phase transition,<br />

relative to traditional bulk mechanical and calorimetric techniques.<br />

tt tg/gt gg<br />

More importantly, we use a miscible blend, PIB with PEB66 (polyethylene-co-1-<br />

butene in which the concentration of 1-butene comonomer units is 66 weight %), to<br />

demonstrate<br />

a general strategy for quantitative evaluation of configurational entropy changes<br />

via combination of temperature-dependent 2D exchange NMR and Adams-Gibbs theory. Our<br />

results on the T g timescale are directly relevant to fundamental understanding of the T g<br />

length-scale, i.e., the dimension of cooperatively rearranging regions.<br />

96

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