A series of polyimide (PI) copolymers were synthesized via a one-step polycondensation procedure from benzophenone-3,3′,4,4′-tetracarboxylic acid dianhydride, toluene diisocyanate (TDI), and 4,4′-methylene bis(phenyl isocyanate) (MDI) with various mole ratios of TDI and MDI ranging from 70:30 to 100:0. The inherent viscosities of the resulting PIs were in the range of 0.51–0.80 dL g−1. The prepared PIs showed good solubility in common organic as well as in less polar solvents. All copolymers afforded tough and flexible films that had good thermal stability with glass transition temperature of 308–325°C and the temperatures of 5% weight loss in air and nitrogen being 420 and 460°C, respectively. The resultant PI films with thickness about 15 μm exhibited high transparency (>88%) in visible region (400–700 nm). Also, the cured PI films possessed good mechanical properties with tensile strength of 60.52–69.31 MPa and tensile modulus of 0.98–1.30 GPa.

A polyimide (PI) based on benzophenone-3,3 0 ,4,4 0 -tetracarboxylic acid dianhydride, toluene diisocyanate (TDI), and 4,4 0 -methylenebis (phenyl isocyanate) (MDI) has been synthesized via a one-step polycondensation procedure. The resulting PI possessed excellent thermal stability with the glass transition temperature (T g ) 316 C, the 5% weight loss temperature (T 5% ) in air and nitrogen 440.4 C and 448.0 C, respectively. The pyrolysis behaviors were investigated with dynamic thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), TGA coupled with Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (TGA-FTIR) and TGA coupled with mass spectrometry (TGA-MS) under air atmosphere. The results of TGA-FTIR and TGA-MS indicated that the main decomposition products were carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), carbonic oxide (CO), water (H 2 O), ammonia (NH 3 ), nitric oxide (NO), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), benzene (C 6 H 6 ), and compounds containing NH 2 , CBN, N@C@O or phenyl groups. The activation energy (E a ) of the solid-state process was estimated using Ozawa-Flynn-Wall (OFW) method which resulted to be 143.8 and 87.8 kJ/mol for the first and second stage. The pre-exponential factor (A) and empirical order of decomposition (n) were determined by Friedman method. The activation energies of different mechanism models were calculated from Coats-Redfern method. Compared with the activation energy values obtained from the OFW method, the actual reaction followed a random nucleation mechanism with the integral form g(a) 5 2ln(1 2 a).