Enabling quantitative analysis of complex polymer blends by infrared nanospectroscopy and isotopic deuteration
Nathaniel Prine, Zhiqiang Cao, Song Zhang, Tianyu Li, Changwoo Do, Kunlun Hong, Camille Cardinal, Travis L. Thornell, Sarah E. Morgan, Xiaodan Gu
Abstract
). In this project, AFM-IR was used to probe the surface morphology and chemical composition of three polymer blends containing deuterated polystyrene; each blend is expected to exhibit various degrees of miscibility. AFM-IR results successfully demonstrated that deuterium labeling prevents infrared spectral overlap and enables the visualization of blend phases that could not normally be distinguished by other scanning probe techniques. The nanoscale domain composition was resolved by fast infrared spectrum analysis. Overall, we presented isotope labeling as a robust approach for circumventing obstacles preventing the quantitative analysis of multiphase systems by AFM-IR.