AVS 47th International Symposium
    Material Characterization Thursday Sessions
       Session MC-ThM

Paper MC-ThM5
High Spatial Resolution XPS and FTIR: An Approach to 3-D Characterization of Polymer Blends

Thursday, October 5, 2000, 9:40 am, Room 207

Session: Polymer Characterization
Presenter: K. Artyushkova, Kent State University
Authors: K. Artyushkova, Kent State University
G. Czwerniec, Kent State University
J.E. Fulghum, Kent State University
B. Wall, Case Western Reserve University
J. Koenig, Case Western Reserve University
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Correlative XPS and FTIR studies of the complex structure of PVC/PMMA polymer blends will be presented. The comparable lateral resolution and real-time imaging capabilities of both techniques allow for a direct comparison of surface (XPS) and bulk (FTIR) measurements of polymer blends. In order to eliminate substrate influence and film-to-film variations, the same areas on the polymer films were analyzed by both methods. The effect of PMMA molecular weight on surface separation and segregation was evaluated using six blends with a constant PVC molecular weight and a PMMA molecular weight varying from 75 kDa to 2,132 kDa. The imaging capabilities of both techniques were used for a qualitative comparison of the heterogeneous structure of the blends, while a quantitative comparison of bulk and surface compositions utilized small area spectroscopy from XPS and FTIR. Based on the quantitative analysis, we can conclude that surface segregation of PMMA increases with increasing molecular weight. Comparison of Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) FTIR, bulk FTIR and large area XPS analyses provides adiditional information about component distrubution in the blend. The combination of high-spatial resolution XPS and FTIR provides a more complete method for characterizing complex polymer films containing differing surface and bulk compositions. This work has been partially supported by NSF ALCOM (DMR89-20147)and 3M. The XPS was funded by a grant from the Keck Foundation and by NSF CHE-9613880.