Towards Controlled Miscibility in Block Copolymers

Block copolymers have long been regarded as interesting candidate materials for advanced thermoplastics or thermoplastic elastomers having desired physical, chemical or transport properties rendered through the formation of continuous nanoscale phases. However, the commercial utility of block copolymers in this context has been impeded by a lack of facile synthesis routes as well as poor control over their thermodynamic behavior. While recent advances in living free radical polymerization methods hold promise for the affordable synthesis of novel block and graft copolymers, their use as commodity polymers will hinge upon their melt-state formability, which in turn is governed by block miscibility. This lecture will present recent efforts towards tuning the miscibility of block copolymers through molecular design of the block components. The development of new "baroplastic elastomers", whose miscibility can be tuned through the application of pressure, will be described.