Novel postsulfonated poly(ether ether ketone)-block-poly(ether sulfone)s as proton exchange membranes for fuel cells: Design, preparation and properties

Ion transport in sulfonated polymers

“…8,20,30,33,58,65 This discovery stimulated several efforts of investigating the transport behavior of a range of sulfonated PEMs possessing nanoscale morphologies, and significantly improved transport properties were unanimously reported in a number of articles. 8,10,32,66 This observation has been rationalized in terms of the enhanced local concentration of ÀSO 3 H groups within the water channels of the nanostructured PEMs owing to confinement.…”

“…It has been widely reported that the phase-separated hydrophobic phases can provide effective mechanical support while the well-arranged nanometer-scale hydrophilic domains facilitate ion transport by means of confinement effects (at the same ion exchange capacity (IEC) value, ions confined within microphase-separated hydrophilic phases are in close proximity, compared to their random analogues). 8,10,28,29 Examples of such polymers include sulfonated poly(styrene-b-isobutylene-b-styrene), 30,31 sulfonated poly(styrene-b-methylbutylene), 28,32 sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone)-b-poly(ether sulfone), 33,34 and sulfonated poly([vinylidene difluoride-chlorotrifluoro ethylene]-gstyrene). 19,35,36 Note in passing that although much of the research on the sulfonated polymers indicated that morphology is important in determining transport properties, the achievement of well-defined structures with long-range order is lacking and it has been the subject of the current studies.…”

“…This can be rationalized as a consequence of different proximities of the sulfonic acid groups, where the closely located ionic moieties are beneficial for obtaining high conductivities. 15,33,36,58 Accordingly, efforts to locate the acid groups in close proximity via synthetic control or by morphological optimization have been widely described. 34,59 (3) In sulfonated polymers, there is an underlying source of polydispersity, originating from the dissimilar spatial distributions of the sulfonic acid groups.…”

A WORM type polymer electrical memory based on polyethersulfone with carbazole derivatives

“…low-conductivity state and high-conductivity state) in response to an external electric field, a principle that is entirely different from that of the silicon-based devices, which store data by encoding “0” and “1” as the amount of charge stored in the cells of the memory device. 6 For these reasons, some novel polymeric materials, such as poly( N -vinylcarbazole) (PVK) and its derivatives, 7 –9 polymers with functional azobenzene moieties, 10 –12 polymers and nanoparticle composites, 13 –15 and polyimides (PIs) with some special chromophores, 16 –20 with electrical memory effects and their applications have been reported recently. Furthermore, several kinds of electrical switching mechanisms have been proposed to explain the polymer’s electrical bistability phenomenon, for example, charge transfer, conformational change, trapping–detrapping and nanocomposite redox.…”

Preparation of polyphenylsulfone containing imidazole group for gas separation membrane material

“…12,13 The above-mentioned methods did not change the intrinsic gas separation properties of the polymer contributed by the chemical structure. In this study, we used sulfonated polyphenylsulfone (SPPSU) as the polymer precursor and obtained a series of SPPSU with different degrees of sulfonation by nucleophilic polymerization [14][15][16] and subsequently introduced imidazole into SPPSU via a simple method. The method we applied for polymer modification in this study is relatively simple, and there are a wide range of applications resulting from lots of species of sulfonated polymers.…”