Electrostatic Interaction on Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation at Low Salt Fraction Revealed by Scattering Techniques
作者:
Wu, XX (Wu, Xiaoxue) [1] , [2] ; Zhou, Y (Zhou, Yue) [1] , [2] ; Song, TT (Song, Tiantian) [1] , [2] ; Chen, XT (Chen, Xiaotong) [1] , [2] ; Shen, L (Shen, Lei) [1] , [2] ; Jiang, HQ (Jiang, Hanqiu) [3] , [4] ; Ke, YB (Ke, Yubin) [3] , [4] ; He, CY (He, Chunyong) [3] , [4] ; Yang, H (Yang, Hua) [3] , [4] ; Shi, WC (Shi, Weichao) [1] , [2]
DOI
10.1021/acs.macromol.3c00012
在线发表
MAR 2023
已索引
2023-04-18
文献类型
Article; Early Access
摘要
Past studies on salt-doped polymer blends indicate that the electrostatic effect is complicated due to the combined effects of translational entropy of dissociated ions, ion solvation, ion-ion correlation, and ion clustering, especially at high salt concentrations. It still remains a challenge to unveil the electrostatic interaction of dissociated ions on phase separation explicitly in experiments. To address this challenge, the key principle of this study is to have the salt at extremely low concentrations, while its effect on phase separation is significant enough to be detected by scattering techniques. This experimental design enables the solvation of dissociated ions as the dominating factor, carefully avoiding complications from other effects. We characterize concentration fluctuations at full length scales by small-angle laser light scattering, X-ray scattering, and neutron scattering. The measured cloud points, spinodal temperatures, correlation lengths, and effective interaction parameters exhibit significant increase with the salt fraction, indicating that the electrostatic interaction promotes phase separation. We further reveal the electrostatic interaction of cations and anions, respectively. The asymmetric deflection of the phase diagram is quantitatively explained by the composition-dependent solvation of dissociated ions. This fundamental research provides experimental support for the progress of recent theoretical work and is helpful to guide the structural control in polymer electrolytes.