SANS Study of PPPO in Mixed Solvents and Impact on Polymer Nanoprecipitation

We investigate the conformation of poly(2,6-diphenyl-p-phenylene oxide) (PPPO) in good and mixed solvents by small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) across its ternary phase diagram. Dichloromethane was selected as a "good" solvent and heptane as a "poor" solvent whose addition eventually induces demixing and polymer precipitation. Below the overlap concentration c*, the polymer conformation is found to be well described by the polymer-excluded volume model and above by the Ornstein-Zernike expression with a correlation length ξ which depends on the concentration and solvent/nonsolvent ratio. We quantify the decrease in polymer radius of gyration R , increase in ξ, and effective χ parameter approaching the phase boundary. Upon flash nanoprecipitation, the characteristic particle radius (estimated by scanning electron microscopy, SEM) is found to scale with polymer concentration as well as with nonsolvent content. Significantly, the solution volume per precipitated particle remains nearly constant at all polymer concentrations. Overall, our findings correlate ternary solution structure with the fabrication of polymer nanoparticles by nonsolvent-induced phase separation and precipitation.