Unveiling re-entrant phase behavior and crystalline-amorphous interactions in semi-conducting polymer:small molecule blends

It has been reported recently that conjugated polymer:small molecule systems might exhibit complex, re-entrant phase behavior with hourglass or closed-loop miscibility gaps due to an 'apparent' lower critical solution temperature branch. However, the study did not firmly establish if the observations were reflecting equilibrium or not. To assure that the observed shapes of the binodals via a mixing experiment represent local near-equilibrium conditions that capture complex molecular interactions or equation-of-state effects, we present here the liquidus and the binodal for the exact same systems, i.e., PTB7-Th:PC61BM, PffBT4T-C9C13:PC71BM and PTB7-Th:EH-IDTBR, with the liquidus measured via a demixing experiment with long annealing time of days to weeks. We observe that the binodal displayed consistent trends with the liquidus, revealing an underlying thermodynamic and not microstructural or kinetic cause behind the complex phase behavior. Our results highlight the need for a novel, sufficiently complex physical model for understanding these non-trivial phase diagrams of semi-conducting materials. We also discover that the composition difference (Delta phi) between liquidus and binodal reflects the crystalline-amorphous interaction, exhibiting a linear relationship with the binodal composition (phi(b,polymer)), i.e., Delta phi increases as chi(aa) decreases. This possibly provides a new approach for obtaining the crystalline-amorphous interaction parameter chi(ca)(T) beyond the commonly used melting point depression method, which estimates chi(ca) near the melting temperature T-m of the crystalline component. The capability of obtaining chi(ca)(T) over a more extended temperature range may encourage more extensive studies and facilitate the understanding of chi(ca) in general, but particularly for all the novel non-fullerene acceptors that are able to crystallize.

Automated summary

It has been reported that conjugated polymer:small molecule systems may exhibit complex phase behavior, but it was unclear if the observations were reflecting equilibrium. To study this, the liquidus and binodal for the same systems were presented, and it was found that the observed trends of the binodal were consistent with the liquidus, suggesting a thermodynamic cause behind the complex phase behavior. Additionally, a linear relationship between the composition difference (Delta phi) and the binodal composition (phi(b,polymer)) was discovered, providing a new approach for obtaining the crystalline-amorphous interaction parameter.