The effect of average soft segment length on morphology and properties of a series of polyurethane elastomers. II. SAXS-DSC annealing study

A series of eight thermoplastic polyurethane elastomers were synthesized from 4,4′-methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) and 1,4-butanediol (BDO) chain extender, with poly(hexamethylene oxide) (PHMO) macrodiol soft segments. The PHMO molecular weights employed ranged from 433 g/mol to 1180 g/mol. All materials contained 60% (w/w) of the macrodiol. The materials were characterized by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) following up to nine different thermal treatments. In addition, three of the materials were selected for characterization by small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) following similar thermal treatments. The DSC experiments showed the existence of five hard segment melting regions (labelled T1-T5), which were postulated to result from the disordering or melting of sequences containing one to five MDI-derived units, respectively. Evidence for urethane linkage dissociation and reassociation during annealing at temperatures above 150°C is presented. This process aids in the formation of higher melting structures. Annealing temperatures of 80-100°C provided the maximum SAXS scattering intensity values. Materials containing longer soft segments (and, therefore, longer hard segments) were observed to develop and sustain higher melting hard domain structures and also develop maximum average interdomain spacing values at higher annealing temperatures. Another additional series of three PHMO-based polyurethanes having narrower hard segment length distributions, was synthesized and characterized by DSC in the as-synthesized and annealed states. The resulting DSC endotherms provided further evidence to suggest that the T1-T5 endotherms were possibly due to melting of various hard segment length populations.