An inverse gas chromatographic characterization of polypyrrole-coated poly(vinyl chloride) powder particles

Polypyrrole-coated poly(vinyl chloride) powder particles (PPy-PVC) were prepared by the in-situ chemical polymerization of pyrrole in aqueous solutions in the presence of PVC powder particles using the method of Ouyang and Chan [Polymer 39 (1998) 1857] and characterized by inverse gas chromatography (IGC). By employing n-alkane, 1-heptene, chloroform and tetrahydrofuran molecular probes, the dispersive and acid–base components of the surface energy of the composite materials were estimated at infinite dilution. The values of the dispersive contribution to the surface energy (γSd), at 50 °C, range from 30.3 to 43.5 mJ/m2 for the composites, which is much lower than the value of 83.2 mJ/m2 obtained for para-toluene sulfonate-doped polypyrrole (PPyTS) bulk powder. This indicates that the injected molecules probe both polypyrrole and the underlying PVC, thus indicating that the conducting polymer is rather patchy at the surface of the insulating polymer substrate. This conclusion supports the previous results obtained by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) [19], indicating that both the coating PPyTS and the substrate PVC are detected by their elemental markers nitrogen and sulfur, and chlorine, respectively.