Insight into the crystallization of multi-phasic polymers.

Abstract

The thesis aims to understand how the solidification process occurring in multi-phasic materials affects the behavior of these polymers. The thesis aims to provide insight into how the initial molecular arrangement of a material can affect the crystallization kinetics, in addition to characterizing and understanding the changes in the material and its electronic and optical properties. This research is structured across eight chapters and delves specifically into understanding the crystallization kinetics of semicrystalline semiconducting polymers PFO and PBTTT, which exhibit a nematic liquid crystal and a smectic liquid crystal, respectively. This work establishes reliable thermal protocols to monitor the crystallization of said materials and characterize the microstructure by a range of techniques including but not limited to fast scanning calorimetry, Wide-angle Scattering, etc. Additionally, our work showcases the behavior of newly synthesized polythioethers with high sulfur content, presenting multiple phases, from characterizing and establishing thermal protocols for the isolation or combination to exploring the kinetics of some of the different phases. This work contributes crucial insights into the influence of pre-existing molecular arrangement or the existence of multiple polymorphic phases in the resulting crystallization kinetics and the microstructure