P B Sunil Kumar

For mesoscale structural studies of polymers, obtaining maximum level of coarse-graining that maintains the chemical specificity is highly desirable. Here we present a systematic coarse-graining study of sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone), sPEEK, and show that a 71:3 coarse-grained (CG) mapping is the maximum possible map within a CG bead-spring model. We perform single chain atomistic simulation on the system to collect various structural distributions, against which the CG potentials are optimized using iterative Boltzmann inversion technique. The potentials thus extracted are shown to reproduce the target distributions for larger single chains as well as for multiple chains. The structure at the atomistic level is shown to be preserved when we back-map the CG system to re-introduce the atomistic details. By using the same CG mapping for another repeat unit sequence of sPEEK, we show that the nature of the effective interaction at the CG level depends strongly on the polymer sequence and cannot be assumed based on the nature of the corresponding atomistic unit. These CG potentials will be the key to future mesoscopic simulations to study the structure of sPEEK based polymer electrolyte membranes. (Figure presented.) .

Sulfonated polyether ether ketone (SPEEK), an ionic polymer, has been shown to be a potential candidate for fuel cell electrolyte as a proton exchange membrane. Rheological behavior of SPEEK solutions is of great interest to understand the molecular associations as well as due to implications in membrane processing. In this work, SPEEK of various degrees of sulfonation (58-80) was prepared and rheology of concentrated solutions of SPEEK was studied. The rheological properties were evaluated using steady and oscillatory shear. It was found that steady shear viscosity and storage modulus at any given concentration, is the highest for the lowest degree of sulfonation SPEEK solutions in N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone. The low frequency plateau in storage modulus was observed at some combinations of degrees of sulfonation and concentrations, indicating gel-like behavior in these SPEEK solutions. No significant change in rheological behavior was observed with different polar solvents. Increase of several orders of magnitude in viscosity, storage and loss moduli were observed with increasing concentrations. The role of hydrophobic aggregation and inter-chain associations in determining rheology of SPEEK solutions is argued based on comparisons with other material systems. The rheological behavior of SPEEK solutions with 70 as the degree of sulfonation, suggests crossover from hydrophobic-hydrophilic balance. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.