Macromolecules, Vol.34, No.14, 4917-4922, 2001
Intermediate segregation type chain length dependence of the long period of lamellar microdomain structures of supramolecular comb-coil diblocks
A characteristic intermediate segregation type chain length dependence of the long period D of the lamellar microdomain structure of a class of comb-coil supramolecules is reported. The supramolecular comb-coil diblock copolymers studied consist, of a polystyrene (PS) "coil" block and a "comb" block of poly(4-vinylpyridine) (P4VP) either hydrogen bonded to pentadecyl phenol (PDP) (i.e., P4VP(PDP)-b-PS) or first protonated with methanesulfonic acid (MSA) and then hydrogen bonded to PDP (i.e., P4VP(MSA)(PDP)-b-PS). fn both cases we find a scaling D similar to N-tot(delta), delta congruent to 0.8, where N-tot denotes the total number of monomers of the P4VP-b-PS backbone. In the case of diblock copolymers this would correspond to a characteristic intermediate segregation regime behavior. Pure PS-b-P4VP, on the other hand, shows the expected strong segregation behavior D similar to N-tot(delta), delta congruent to 0.7.