Ion Transport in Pendant and Backbone Polymerized Ionic Liquids

Polymerized ionic liquids (PILs) are single-ion conductors in which one of the ionic species is tethered to the polymer chain while the other is free to be transported. The ionic species can either be directly incorporated into the polymeric backbone (backbone PILs) or placed as pendant groups to the chain (pendant PILs). Here, we examined the morphology, conductivity, and rheology of imidazolium-based pendant and backbone PILs. We found that pendant PILs yielded higher ionic conductivity when scaled to Tg, but backbone PILs exhibited higher ionic conductivity on an absolute temperature scale, likely because of differences in the Tgs of the two systems. We also found that ion transport for backbone PILs was coupled to the segmental dynamics below Tg, where the decoupling of ionic conductivity from segmental relaxation was observed for pendant PILs. The results of this study will help the community to better understand the role of the PIL structure on conductivity to work toward the ultimate goal of designing high-performance solid polymer electrolytes

3D microfabrication of single-wall carbon nanotube/polymer composites by two-photon polymerization lithography

We present a method to develop single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT)/polymer composites into arbitrary three-dimensional micro/nano structures. Our approach, based on two-photon polymerization lithography, allows one to fabricate three-dimensional SWCNT/polymer composites with a minimum spatial resolution of a few hundreds nm. A near-infrared femtosecond pulsed laser beam was focused onto a SWCNT-dispersed photo resin, and the laser light solidified a nanometric volume of the resin. The focus spot was three-dimensionally scanned, resulting in the fabrication of arbitrary shapes of SWCNT/polymer composites. SWCNTs were uniformly distributed throughout the whole structures, even in a few hundreds nm thick nanowires. Furthermore, we also found an intriguing phenomenon that SWCNTs were self-aligned in polymer nanostructures, promising improvements in mechanical and electrical properties. Our method has great potential to open up a wide range of applications such as micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems, micro/nano actuators, sensors, and photonics devices based on CNTs.the National Science Foundation Grant No. OISE-096840