Sphere to vesicle transition induced by polymerization in a PEB-b-PEO modified epoxy matrix

JULIETA PUIG; ILEANA A. ZUCCHI; ROBERTO J. J. WILLIAMS; WALTER F. SCHROEDER

Cancún

Simposio; XV Simposio Latinoamericano de Polímeros - SLAP 2016; 2016

Sociedad Polimérica de México (SPM)

Vesicles are a particularly attractive morphology to be developed in nanostructured epoxy thermosets. Vesicles formed from block copolymers (BCP) are closed, spherical objects consisting of a thin bilayer membrane that encases the epoxy resin. The interest in this morphology resides on the fact that a small amount of the BCP can produce a large effective modifier volume fraction. This is because the BCP forms just the shell of the structure whereas the volume of the vesicle phase consists of both the shell and the encapsulated epoxy portion. To date, few studies have reported on nanostructured epoxy networks modified with vesicles. In all of them, the nanostructure was obtained by self-assembly in the precursors before curing. Therefore, the role of curing was just to freeze the morphology that was already present. In this work we report a different strategy in which the vesicles are formed during polymerization as the result of polymerization induced self-assembly. The mechanism of nanostructuration was investigated by in situ SAXS experiments.