Rigid-rod composites

Rigid-rod compositions consisting of polyphenylene derivatives were used by Goldberg [2] as advanced thermoplastics in preparing orthodontic wire. 

ET40)/PET blends, and in the 100/0 wt% P(HB80-ET20)/PET blend. This is because of either (a) a high content of rigid rod-like liquid crystalline component, or (b) an enthalpy which was too small to detect. The dependence of Tg on the blend composition can be evaluated by using the Gordon-Taylor Equation [37],... 

The last two decades of research on high performance rigid-rod polymers and molecular composites have produced a wide variety of material systems for evaluation. The purpose here is not to present a comprehensive review but rather to describe these relatively recent research developments with regard to the synthetic methods and approaches that have been utilized. In doing this some properties of the polymers are discussed as well as some of the problems encountered in conjunction with their synthesis and evaluation. In an effort to limit the scope of the review, we will address only aromatic heterocyclic rigid-rod polymers, extended chain polymers and derived molecular composites. 

The mechanical properties (Table 4) of the resulting molecular composite fiber films demonstrated a virtually complete translation of rigid-rod polymer modulus on a volume fraction basis to the host matrix. This implied that the... 

More recently [79], a carboxy-terminated PBZT ([r ] = 4.8 dL/g) was reacted with m-phenoxybenzoic acid via a Friedel Craft procedure in a meth-anesulfonic acid/P2Os mixture. This provided an ABA block copolymer in which the outer blocks (A) are composed of flexible coil polyetherketone (PEK) and a center block (B) which contains the rigid-rod PBZT. Thermomechanical analysis showed that 20 PBZT/80 PEK and 10 PBZT/90 PEK compositions exhibited glass transition temperatures of 157 °C and 135°C respectively. Consolidation studies have not been investigated to date. 

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