| Ionomers (polymers containing a small amount of ionic groups) are used for various current technologies, such as hydrogen fuel cells, sensors, water purifications, and drug delivery. In addition, ionomers are widely used for solution studies due to their unique behavior and potential application to processing from solution (e.g., membrane fabrication). Recently, ionic liquid was found to be an effective additive (to a low-polarity solvent) to dissolve ionomers, which will be used for processing ionomer films and fibers. Despite the usefulness of the solution study, ionomers used so far are random ionomers in which ionic groups are randomly distributed along the polymer chain and thus data analysis and model calculation become complex.;In this study, a monofunctional telechelic ionomer that had an ionic group only at one chain end was used. This made analysis easier and simpler. In this work, viscosity and dynamic light scattering were used to study the effect of ionic liquid on the telechelic ionomers in nonpolar solvent, toluene. In nonpolar solvent, ionic groups formed ion pairs which were attracted each other to form ionic aggregates, resulting in molecular aggregate formation. This was confirmed by an increase in reduced viscosity and effective (hydrodynamic) diameter of the telechelic ionomer solutions. Upon addition of ionic liquid, 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium trifluoromethane sulfonate (EMIM-TF), ionic aggregates were disrupted and the size of molecular aggregates was decreased, approaching to that of nonionic polymer of the same molecular weight. |
