We will discuss our recent effort to prepare liquid chalcogenide hybrid inorganic/ organic polymers (CHIPs) made from elemental sulfur. In 2013, we have developed a new process, termed, inverse vulcanization, which enabled the direct copolymerization of molten elemental sulfur with vinylic comonomers. The sulfur copolymers were also demonstrated to exhibit dynamic covalent bond character due to the presence of long S-S bonds in the copolymer backbone. The dynamic S-S bonds can be thermally activated and generate sulfur radicals from S-S bond scission at elevated temperatures and react with other vinylic monomers through thiol-ene reaction. This process, termed iterative dynamic copolymerizaion (IDC), enables the incorporation of other vinylic comonomer such as acrylates and allylic compounds. We will discuss our efforts to prepare liquid like CHIPs from sulfur and styrene via inverse vulcanization and use it as a precursor for iterative dynamic copolymerizaion to make new sulfur materials. In particular, we will discuss the synthesis of this novel sulfur-styrene copolymer, the electric properties for energy storage and the use in IDC process to incorporate new functional comonomers.

Liquid chalcogenide hybrid inorganic/organic polymers (CHIPs) via iterative dynamic copolymerizations

254th National Meeting (2017)

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