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Cloud-point curves of blends of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) with a series of oligodiols based on a bisphenol A nucleus and short branches of poly(ethylene oxide) or poly(propylene oxide) (BPA-EO or BPA-PO), and with PEO and PPO oligomers, were obtained using a light transmission device. Experimental results were fitted with the Flory- Huggins model using an interaction parameter depending on both temperature and composition. For PMMA/PEO and PMMA/PPO blends, the miscibility increased when increasing the size of the diol, due to the significant decrease in the entropic and enthalpic terms contributing to the interaction parameter. This reflected the decrease in the selfassociation of solvent molecules and in the contribution of terminal OH groups to the mismatching of solubility parameters. For PMMA/BPA-EO blends, a decrease of the entropic contribution to the interaction parameter when increasing the size of the oligodiol was also found. However, the effect was counterbalanced by the opposite contribution of combinatorial terms leading to cloud-point curves located in approximately the same temperature range. For PMMA/BPA-PO blends, the interaction parameter exhibited a very low value. In this case, the effect of solvent size was much more important on combinatorial terms than on the interaction parameter, leading to an increase in miscibility when decreasing the oligodiol size. For short BPA-PO oligodiols no phase separation was observed. The entropic contribution of the interaction parameter exhibited an inverse relationship with the size of the oligodiols, independent of the nature of the chains bearing the hydroxyls and the type of OH groups (primary or secondary). This indicates that the degree of self-association of solvent molecules through their OH terminal groups, was mainly determined by their relative sizes., Comment: Final published version available in Polymer (Elsevier), at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032386104008080

Nanostructured thermosets may be obtained by self-assembly of amphiphilic block copolymers in a reactive solvent and fixation of the morphologies by the cross-linking reaction. Nanostructuration requires the presence of a bock that remains miscible in the polymer during polymerization. The selection of the miscible block depends on the particular system and in some cases (e.g., for epoxy-amine network based on diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A, and 4,4'- diaminodiphenylsulfone) it is very difficult to find such a block. In this manuscript it is shown that random copolymers of methyl methacrylate (MMA) and N,N-dimethylacrylamide (DMA) containing different molar fractions of DMA, can be used as a miscible block for the nanostructuration of epoxies. The miscibility of the random copolymer during formation of the epoxy network was first analyzed determining cloud-point conversions as a function of the molar fraction of DMA in the copolymer. A thermodynamic model of the phase separation was performed using the Flory-Huggins model and taking the polydispersities of both polymers into account. A single expression of the interaction parameter based on the theory of random copolymers provided a reasonable fitting of the experimental cloud-point curves. The significant increase in the miscibility produced by using small DMA molar fractions in the copolymer was explained by the high negative value of the binary interaction energy between DMA and the epoxy-amine solvent, associated to the positive value of the interaction energy between DMA and MMA units. Block copolymers with poly(n-butyl acrylate) as the immiscible block and the random copolymer P(MMA-co-DMA) as the miscible block were used for the nanostructuration of epoxy networks. The necessary molar fraction of DMA in the miscible block to stabilize a dispersion of nanosize domains depended on the fraction of the immiscible block., Comment: Author's version of a published article, available at Macromolecules (ACS), http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ma062185l