The chemical versatility and diversity of conjugated polymers leads to a remarkably large number of possible chemical structures.  Efficiently navigating this large parameter space is key to obtaining chemical, mechanical and electrical properties needed for various applications.  Our group has recently made progress in predicting the persistence length, glass transition temperature, nematic to isotropic transition and entanglement length of conjugated polymers from the chemical structure to accelerate the development of these materials for flexible and stretchable electronic devices.  Along the way, we have demonstrated that rheology is a powerful tool to elucidate the mechanical properties and phase behavior of conjugated polymers, as well as for the measurement of the glass transition temperature.  Rheology reveals subtle signatures of chain stretching as a function of molecular weight, by demonstrating how the glass transition changes with molecular weight.  Furthermore, rheology shows how conjugated polymers un-entangle as they become liquid crystalline, leading to significantly “softer” materials that are more conductive than when isotropic. Altogether, measurements of fundamental properties of conjugated polymers elucidate key aspects of this class of materials that are crucial to tune mechanical and electrical properties, and lead to analytical descriptions of how glass transition temperature and entanglement modulus depend on the chemical structure.

Predicting properties of conjugated polymers from the chemical structure

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