Mechanical properties and hysteresis behaviour of multigraft copolymers

PS-PI multigraft copolymers with tri- tetra- and hexafunctional polystyrene branch points have been studied to investigate the influence of molecular architecture on morphological and tensile properties and to find novel material concepts. It was found that the morphological behaviour of these grafted copolymers can be predicted using theoretical approaches. The number of branch points, however, greatly influences the long-range order of microphase separation. Additionally, two new parameters for adjusting mechanical properties of multigraft copolymers are found in our investigations: i) functionality of the graft copolymer: tri-, tetra- or hexafunctional and 2) number of branch points per molecule. Tetra-functional multigraft copolymers show surprising high strain at break values up to 1550 %. With increasing number of branch points strain at break and tensile strength increase, where a linear dependence of mechanical properties on the number of branch points is obvious. Excellent elasticity of tetra and hexafunctional multigraft copolymers at high deformation was proved in hysteresis experiments.