Copolymer Fingerprints of Polystyrene-<i>block</i>-polyisoprene by MALDI-ToF-MS

Abstract

MALDI-ToF-MS mass spectra of copolymers contain a lot of information on both chain length distribution (CLD) and chemical composition distribution (CCD). In this paper an approach for extracting detailed information from a MALDI-ToF-MS mass spectrum is presented that enables the study of microstructure for copolymers. More specifically, this paper is dealing with a polystyrene-block-polyisoprene copolymer, in which the growth of the second block is followed with MALDI-ToF-MS as a function of conversion. The technique is compared to 1H NMR for the evaluation of average chemical compositions, revealing that ionization efficiencies do not influence the obtained mass spectra. It is shown that MALDI-ToF-MS can extract detailed information on the chain length distributions (CLDs) for both polystyrene and polyisoprene blocks. Using random coupling statistics, it is shown that the proposed analysis yields results with a high accuracy.