In polymer membranes branching leads to desirable film forming characteristics, although in fluorinated hyperbranched systems the resulting material lacks any chain entanglement or crystallinity - which becomes problematic for systems where mechanical robustness in required. Techniques to mitigate the mechanical deficiencies of perfluorinated hyperbranched systems will be reported here. A variety of AB<sub>2</sub> monomers were prepared with varying lengths of linear, alkyl spacers. The AB<sub>2</sub> monomers were copolymerized with a variety of linear AB perfluorinated monomers and the resulting mechanical properties were examined. For materials lacking any mechanical resilience a poly(ether ether ketone) (PEEK) was used as a strengthening agent. These techniques have shown to create robust and creasable polymer membranes from highly branched systems.

Improving mechanical properties of highly branched perfluorinated polymer membranes

249th National Meeting (2015)

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