Natural Rubber-Based Ionogels

Natural rubber (NR), besides being an abundant renewable resource for the elastomer industry, can be a potential resource for the design of innovative biobased polymer networks. The present work is based on telechelic liquid natural rubber oligomers obtained by controlled chemical degradation of NR. The chain ends of such oligomers can then be functionalized (with acrylate functions in the present case) and reacted with multifunctional crosslinkers in order to form networks. What's more, the initial solubility of such thermosetting system in an ionic liquid (IL) can be used for the formulation of ionogels. Such solid networks typically containing 80% of IL were produced, resulting in high ionic conductivity performances. The oligomer chain length was shown to affect IL fragility due to confinement and specific interactions of ions with the host polymer network.