Polymer electrolyte membranes Polymeric models

When used in different kinds of electrochemical equipment the membranes are in contact with aqueous solutions of the low molecular weight electrolytes in which they swell. Moreover, a certain amount of the ambient solution penetrates the voids or pores in the membrane. So the swollen membrane is a multiphase system composed of an ion containing component appearing in a gel state, an inert partly crystalline polymer, and the electrolyte filling any voids or nonselec-tive domains, all of them in varying amounts. For such a system it is possible to calculate the approximate phase composition based on the conductivity and the multilayer electrochemical model. We presented such a model at the First Italian-Polish Seminar on Multi-component Polymeric Systems in 1979. 

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