Thermoplastic polyetherimide polymer blends

Because the components must initially form miscible solutions or swollen networks a degree of affinity between the reacting components is needed. Therefore, most of the investigations into epoxy IPNs have involved the use of partially miscible components such as thermoplastic urethanes (TPU) with polystyrenes [57], acrylates [58-61] or esters which form loose hydrogen-bound mixtures during fabrication [62-71 ]. Epoxy has also been modified with polyetherketones [72],polyether sulfones [5] and even polyetherimides [66] to help improve fracture behavior. These systems, due to immiscibility, tend to be polymer blends with distinct macromolecular phase morphologies and not molecularly mixed compounds. 

This review summarizes our work at the University of Bayreuth over the last few years on improving the electret performance of the commodity polymer isotactic polypropylene (Sect. 3) and the commodity polymer blend system polystyrene/polyphenylene ether (Sect. 4) to provide electret materials based on inexpensive and easily processable polymers. To open up polymer materials for electret applications at elevated temperatures we concentrated our research on commercially available high performance thermoplastic polyetherimide resins and synthesized several fluorinaled polyetherimides to identify structure-property relations and to improve further the performance at elevated temperatures (Sect. 5). 

Hou Hourston, D. J., Lane, J. M. The toughening of epoxy resins with thermoplastics 1. Trifunctional epoxy resin-polyetherimide blends. Polymer 33 (1992) 1379-1383. 

---