Research on the relationship between structure and properties of the soluble polyaryl ether ketone terminated with phthalonitrile

A novel soluble poly(aryl ether ketone) (PAEK) terminated with 4-nitrophthalonitrile was designed and synthesized, which was used to solve the problem of difficult solution processing. Then, a series of cross-linked PAEK films with different thermal treatment temperatures were fabricated by using 4,4-bis(3,4-dicyanophenoxy)biphenyl (BPH) as a novel cross-linking agent, improving the glass transition temperature ( T g ) of the traditional PAEK. Then, the fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrum, X-ray diffraction (XRD), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA), dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), mechanical testing machine and LCR meter were used to investigate the microstructure, thermal, mechanical and dielectric properties of PAEK films, respectively. The results indicated that the increase in heat-treatment time and temperature are beneficial for the improvement of the value of T g and T 5% , and the excellent thermal stability and mechanical properties of PAEK films are demonstrated. Compared to PAEK-1 film, the T g and T 5% both increased by 63 °C for PAEK-4 film. Significantly, the tensile strength of PAEK-3 film (42 MPa) reaches the highest value in comparison with other samples. In addition, the dielectric constants (ε) and loss tangent (tan δ) of PAEK-4 film is as low as 3.67 and 0.001 at 1 kHz, respectively. More importantly, the dielectric properties are found to be relatively stable to near the T g value, which can be widely used for applications in dielectric energy storage at high temperatures.