Citation

Shaomei Yu, Feng Yan*, Xingwang Zhang, Jingbi You, Peiyi Wu, Jianmei Lu*, Qingfeng Xu, Xuewei Xia, and Guilin Ma. Polymerization of Ionic Liquid-Based Microemulsions: A Versatile Method for the Synthesis of Polymer Electrolytes. Macromolecules 2008, 41, 3389-3392.

Abstract

We present here the first example of polymerization of microemulsions comprising surfactantstabilized IL nanodomains. Polymerization of these IL-based microemulsions yielded free-standing, flexible, and transparent polymer electrolytes even though the resulting vinyl polymers are incompatible with IL cores. The obtained IL/polymer composites show high conductivity at both room temperature and elevated temperature. This facile yet and effective method provides a versatile platform for the preparation of semisolid polymer electrolytes containing ILs.  Although we only demonstrated this method with vinyl monomers of styrene, methyl methacrylate, vinyl acetate, and N,N-dimethylacrylamide and only one surfactant as examples, we believe that this method should be extendable to other liquid monomers with similar polarity and ionic liquids with desirable properties. The elucidation of interaction between the polymeric matrix and ionic liquids need to be further explored in future work.