Re‐Plasticization by Confinement During Annealing Induced Phase Separation in Polycarbonate/Phthalate Plasticized Films
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Summary: It is common practice during the analysis using optical microscopy to place the sample on a microscope slide and cover it with a cover slide or another microscope slide. The sample is thus sandwiched or “confined” between two glass surfaces. Such a set up is used in all disciplines of science to study the changes in the structure and morphology of materials caused by annealing and other processes in situ. We describe a case of annealing induced phase separation in polycarbonate plasticized with diphenyl terephthalate and diphenyl isophthalate, which unexpectedly showed a significant difference between the confined configuration as defined above and the “unconfined” state. This was traced to the large depression of the melting point of the plasticizer in the polymer. When annealing was performed with the composite film confined between two glass slides, with the temperatures used here, the phase‐separated small molecule melts and re‐plasticizes the polymer. As a result, there was no increase (recovery) of the T g of the polymer with annealing temperature. Such a confinement (or overcoating) could be a route to maintaining the T g of the composite in multi‐layer devices, even if phase separation occurs during the operation of the device. However, when the covering glass slide was not used, sublimation of the plasticizer occurred, and the normal T g recovery was seen. This is also the first reported case of re‐plasticization of the polymer upon annealing in such a confined state. We also note significant differences in the phase separation behaviour of the terephthalate and isophthalate configurations. Optical micrographs of films annealed at 130 °C for 2 h: left: DPTP/BPAPC: 10/90, confined; right: DPTP/BPAPC: 10/90, unconfined. magnified image Optical micrographs of films annealed at 130 °C for 2 h: left: DPTP/BPAPC: 10/90, confined; right: DPTP/BPAPC: 10/90, unconfined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".