Trends in Thermoresponsive Behavior of Lipophilic Polymers

Published

December 1, 2016

Author(s)

Priyanka Bhattacharya, Uma Shantini Ramasamy, Susan T. Krueger, Joshua W. Robinson, Barbara J. Tarasevich, Ashlie Martini, Lelia Cosimbescu

Abstract

In an effort to look for correlations between viscosity index trends of polymers in oils and size changes of polymers in solution with temperature, the determination of the size of thermo-responsive polymers of various architectures (linear, comb, star, and hyperbranched) using two experimental techniques – dynamic light scattering and small angle neutron scattering, and predictive molecular dynamics simulations is described herein. The aim of this work was to predict their behavior as viscosity index improvers (VIIs) using these tools which require minimal amounts of material, as opposed to measuring kinematic viscosities, which require multi-gram quantities. Conflicting trends were obtained using the different aforementioned techniques due to the inherent physics of the measurements. While we provide potential explanations for the trends observed, the focus of this work remains the assessment of any of these techniques as a predictive tool for polymer behavior in an oil matrix. It was concluded that none of the aforementioned techniques can entirely predict the polymer behavior as VIIs, at least in the temperature range studied (40°C to 100 °C).

Citation

Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research

Volume

55

Issue

51

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

viscosity index, thermo-responsive polymer, dynamic light scattering, small-angle neutron scattering

Citation

Bhattacharya, P. , Ramasamy, U. , Krueger, S. , Robinson, J. , Tarasevich, B. , Martini, A. and Cosimbescu, L. (2016), Trends in Thermoresponsive Behavior of Lipophilic Polymers, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=921647 (Accessed October 15, 2025)