Nano-Ordered Sea-Island Phase Separation of Ion-Conductive Elastomer Blends Based on NBR and Polyether Electrolytes

To create novel antistatic polymer materials, we prepared ion-conductive elastomer blends consisting of commercial NBR (with acrylonitrile (AN) content of 18 and 33% (NBR18, NBR33)) with nano-ordered domains of polyether electrolyte. In this study, we prepared blend samples using two different methods, solvent-casting and mechanical mixing methods. The oligo-[(ethylene oxide)-co-(propylene oxide)] methacrylate (M(EO/PO)) was mixed and polymerized in the NBR matrix including KSCN. Obtained elastomer blends showed relatively good conductivity more than 10−7 S cm−1 and the difference in the conductivity of the cast samples under dry and wet conditions was especially very small, and the ratio of conductivity under dry and wet condition of NBR18 blends was lower than 0.06. The TEM images indicated that the order of sea-island phase separation in blend samples may effect on the ion-conductive behavior under different humidity conditions. Moreover, the NBR33 with 30 wt% of PM(EO/PO) sample showed the conductivity of the order of 10−6 S cm−1, and we considered that the large interface between NBR33 and polyether electrolyte domains may effect the increase in the conductivity.