Introducing Dr. Jerrick Edmund

The mixing of chemically dissimilar polymers (i.e., polymer blending) is an attractive route to create hybrid materials with useful and tunable physicochemical properties. Importantly, it provides a practical solution to bypass the expensive sorting step to further improve the recycling rate of plastic waste. Yet, many polymer blends exhibit poor material properties due to thermodynamic immiscibility, hindering their current implementation as a recycling strategy. Hence, the compatibilization of immiscible polymer blends is essential to generate materials with improved performance. Electrostatic interactions in low dielectric polymer media facilitate polymer blend compatibilization through strong, attractive bonds that overcome chain repulsion. While this compatibilization strategy has been previously shown to be effective, there is a limited understanding in controlling the phase behavior and macroscopic properties of sparsely charged, compatibilized blends. Moreover, counterion-free ionic bond formation strategies during electrostatic blending are currently limited to acid-base proton transfers. This work employs model systems to explore polymer design parameters that directly influence material properties upon electrostatic blend compatibilization