Electrospinning and characterization of self-assembled inclusion complexes

Electrospinning is a technique that allows production of polymeric fibers with diameters ranging from nanometers to a few microns, and thus with an inherent high surface-to-volume ratio. Electrospun fibers are finding potential applications in drug delivery and tissue engineering, as membranes and chemical sensors, and in nanocomposites and electronic devices. Electrospinning was initially used to prepare disordered, non-woven mats, but it is now possible to produce highly aligned fibers by using different target collectors. However, it is of great interest to not only control the macroscopic alignment of the fibers but also their orientation at the molecular level since it influences the mechanical, optical and electrical properties of polymers. Molecular complexes were targeted as a means of increasing molecular orientation in electrospun fibers.;Electrospinning can also sometimes be used to prepare metastable polymeric materials that cannot be prepared by the conventional methods. Here, solution electrospinning was used to prepare fibers of both the stable (alpha) and "metastable" (beta) complexes between PEO and urea. Detailed characterization of the ill-studied beta complex reveals that it possesses a 12:8 PEO:urea stoichiometry and belongs to the orthorhombic system with a = 1.907 nm, b = 0.862 nm, and c = 0.773 nm. The PEO chains are oriented along the fiber axis and present a conformation significantly affected by strong hydrogen bonding with urea as compared to the pure polymer and the stable alpha complex. A layered structure, rather than the conventional channel structure, is suggested.;In contrast with previous suggestions based on melt-quenched PEO-urea alpha complex, our results further indicate that the beta complex is thermodynamically stable before melting and can phase-transfer to the alpha complex and liquid PEO through a thermodynamic melt-recrystallization process at 89 ºC. In contrast, the beta complex obtained by melt-quenching the a complex is mixed with urea crystal and is metastable. It can experience a kinetic solid-solid phase transition process to produce a complex within a large temperature range. This transition is induced by a PEO conformation change and by the formation of intermolecular hydrogen bonds between urea and PEO. The phase diagram of the PEO/urea system was drawn over the complete composition range, which allowed interpreting the formation of various out-of-equilibrium mixtures observed experimentally.;The structure and phase diagram of the PEO/thiourea complex, another poorly understood system, was also studied in detail. An EO:thiourea molar ratio of 3:2 was deduced for the complex, and a monoclinic unit cell with a = 0.915 nm, b = 1.888 nm, c = 0.825 nm and beta = 92.35º was determined. Just as for the PEO-urea beta complex, a layered structure was suggested for the PEO-thiourea complex, in which the thiourea molecules would be arranged into a ribbon-like structure intercalated between two PEO layers. This layered structure could explain the much lower melting temperature of the PEO-thiourea (110 ºC) and PEO-urea beta complexes (89 ºC) as compared to the well known channel-structured PEO-urea alpha complex (143 ºC).;In the host-guest urea inclusion complexes (ICs), polymer chains are packed in one-dimensional channels constructed from an essentially infinite three-dimensional network of hydrogen-bonded urea molecules. The polymer chains are thus highly extended at the molecular scale. PEO-urea complex nanofibers have been prepared for the first time by electrospinning of suspension and solutions. As predicted, an unusually large molecular orientation in the fibers was achieved. Such highly ordered IC fibers could find use both for fundamental studies of the inclusion complexes and for the preparation of hierarchically structured materials.;Keywords: Electrospinning, nanofibers, self-assembly, orientation, complexes, layer-structure, phase diagram, X-ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy.