Electroactive polymers have long shown promise to be of use to a variety of fields including energy storage, biomedical and industrial applications, as well microelectronics. In order to better design electroresponsive polymeric systems, a better understanding of how nanoscale interactions contribute to the electromechanical response is needed. The rational synthesis of electroresponsive polymers has the potential to achieve tailored responses by tuning conductivity, rigidity, degree of deformation, or response time all through molecular design. This work describes how counter-anion identity (Br and BF4) in ionic block copolymers substantially affects the mechanism of electromechanical response, where the propensity of ion dissociation drives whether the film expands (low dissociation) or contracts (high dissociation). In situ neutron reflectometry measurements collected under applied electric fields provide nanoscale resolution of polymer and counter-anion motion and were compared directly to computational models which incorporated applied fields on similar length scales. These results demonstrate not only the impact of counter-anion identity on the mechanism of electromechanical response, but also shows the importance of having experimental and computational experiments converge at a length scale relevant to understanding these processes.

Probing the electromechanical response of ionic block copolymers using neutron reflectometry

255th National Meeting (2018)

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