RESUMO
High-performance water-soluble polymers have a wide range of applications from engineering materials to biomedical plastics. However, existing materials are either natural polymers that lack high thermostability or rigid synthetic polymers. Therefore, we design an amino acid-derived building block, 4,4'-diamino-α-truxillate dianion (4ATA2-), that induces water solubility in high-performance polymers. Polyimides containing 4ATA2- units are intrinsically water-soluble and are processed into films cast from an aqueous solution. The resulting polyimide films exhibit exceptional transparency and extremely high thermal stability. In addition, the films can be made insoluble in water by simple post-treatment using weak acid or multivalent metal ions such as calcium. The synthesized polyimide's derived from bio-based resources are useful for yielding waterborne polymeric high-performance applications.
RESUMO
Biopolyimides poly(ATA-CBDA), made from of 4,4'-diamino-α-truxillic acid dimethyl ester (ATA) and 1,2,3,4-cyclobutanetetracarboxylic dianhydride (CBDA), is synthesized and measured its electric volume resistivity at various experimental conditions. The effects of film size, thickness, drying time, and the electric field strength on electric resistivity are investigated and compared with polyimide (Kapton). The electric resistivity for all polyimide and biopolyimide are distributed in the range of 1015-1016 Ωcm, which shows that biopolyimide has high electrical insulation as well as polyimide. The electric resistivity strongly depends on film thickness, which suggests that electric resistivity is a function of electric field strength. The critical electric field for polyimide and biopolyimide films are determined to be 5.8 × 107 V/m and 3.2 × 107 V/m, respectively. Humidity was found to strongly affect the electric resistivity; ~1016 Ωcm at 34% RH and ~1013 Ωcm at 60% RH for both polyimide and biopolyimide films.
