The effect of annealing temperature on latex film dissolution

Abstract

The steady-state fluorescence technique (SSF) was used to study the dissolution of polystyrene (PS) latex films in toluene. The main objective of this study was to explore the effects of annealing temperature on the dissolution behavior of the PS films. It has been shown that dissolution coefficients of PS films are highly affected by the annealing temperatures. It was found that, while PS films dissolved as entangled clusters when annealed at low temperatures, they dissolved as individual chains at high annealing temperatures. The results showed that when the annealing temperature increases, the dissolution takes place in the disentanglement regime. The decrease in dissolution coefficients, Dd, can be explained as a shift of dissolution from the entangled clusters regime to the disentanglement regime. The measured Dd values were found to be in between 4.2 and 1.0 x 10(-10) cm2 s(-1) for an annealing temperature range of 110-220 degrees C.