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Thermal Transport in Ampholytic Polymers: The Role of Hydrogen Bonding and Water Uptake
24.06.2020
Our last work has just been accepted in the journal “Macromolecules”. We investigate the thermal conductivity of several ampholytic polymers. This unique class of polymers offers H bond donor and acceptor groups in each repeat unit and constitutes a one-component system. We use IR spectroscopy to characterize the bonding strength and motifs based on the carbonyl peak. For the dry ampholytic polymers, we find a correlation between H bond strength and thermal conductivity. We also characterized the influence of hydration under various relative humidity conditions, which mostly led to an increase in thermal conductivity. This increase can be rationalized by the formation of a water–polymer nanocomposite material and can be described by volume-weighted mixing models