Guest molecules, like cyclopentanone (CPO), N,Ndimethylformamide (DMF) tetrahydrofuran (THF) and 1,3−dioxolane (DOL), which are able to cocrystallize with poly(L-lactic acid) (PLLA), can also generate high degree of crystalline phase orientation, by simple sorption in amorphous unoriented PLLA films. This crystalline phase orientation is defined as a ∥ c ∥ (a-parallel, c-parallel) because the ac plane of most crystallites is preferentially parallel to the film plane. This crystalline phase orientation, which is achieved without stretching even for high thickness films, is unprecedented for PLLA and can be maintained after suitable guest exchange procedures. The reported results confirm the recent hypothesis that cocrystallization with lowmolecular-mass guest molecules could be a common route for getting uniplanar orientations of polymer crystalline phases, even in the absence of stretching. Wide angle X-ray diffraction analyses of unoriented and oriented PLLA samples have allowed proposing the structure of the cocrystalline form of PLLA with CPO. In particular, four PLLA chains exhibiting the 10/7 helical conformation and 16 CPO guest molecules are packed according the space group P2 1 2 1 2 1 in an orthorhombic lattice with a = 1.61 nm, b = 1.26 nm, and c = 2.90 nm. The presence in PLLA cocrystalline structures of dense bc layers with close-packed polymer helices allows an easy rationalization of the observed uniplanar orientation.
■ INTRODUCTIONPolymeric cocrystalline forms, i.e. structures were a polymeric host and a low-molecular-mass guest are cocrystallized, although early recognized in literature, have been ignored for many decades. 1−15 Only in the last 2 decades have a few polymeric cocrystalline forms received attention in material science, mainly due to their ability to produce nanoporouscrystalline forms, 16−21 as a consequence of guest removal. 16,22,23 In the past decade, it has been also found that cocrystallization with suitable guest molecules of two commercial polymers: syndiotactic polystyrene (s-PS) and poly(2,6-dimethyl-1,4-phenylene ether) (PPO), can lead without any stretching procedure to high thickness f ilms (up to 200− 300 μm) with high degrees of different kinds of uniplanar orientations of the crystalline phases, i.e., with high degrees of parallelism of well-defined crystal planes with respect to the film plane. 24−34 In particular, for s-PS films, three different kinds of uniplanar orientations can be achieved by simple procedures involving cocrystallization in the presence of suitable guest molecules (solution crystallization, 24−26 solventinduced crystallization in amorphous samples, 27−30 or solventinduced recrystallizations of suitable crystalline films 31 ). The three observed uniplanar orientations correspond to the three simplest orientations of a high planar-density layer (formed by close-packed alternated enantiomorphous s-PS helices) with respect to the film plane. 32,33 As for PPO, two different kinds of uniplanar orientations have been recently obtained by cocrystallizat...