High temperature and pressure extraction to purify conjugated polymers

Kathy Woody,  Amit Palkar,  Joe Bullock
Phillips 66


Abstract

Methods to effectively purify conjugated polymers for organic electronics applications are limited. Trace amounts of impurities, in particular metal impurities, are known to be detrimental to organic electronic device performance. A general need exists to find a versatile, inexpensive and commercially attractive method to purify conjugated polymers. The most commonly used methods to purify conjugated polymers are based on solubility properties. One approach is precipitation of the polymer, which depends on the impurities being more soluble than the polymer. This technique is easily scalable, but does not appreciably improve the purity of the material. Purification based on partial solubility has been the most widely used approach. Soxhlet extraction is one such approach in which a solid sample of polymer is exposed to warm solvent which selectively dissolves impurities while the polymer remains. By switching between various solvents, the catalyst, ligands, and unreacted monomers may be removed from the polymer. This method requires several days to complete and is not highly effective at complete removal of impurities. In this presentation, a high temperature and pressure extraction of conjugated polymers is performed to improve the purity of conjugated polymers. The polymers in this study were produced via a palladium catalyzed Stille reaction, and were shown to have up to 5000 ppm residual palladium, or 70% of the initial catalyst loading, even after purification by Soxhlet extraction. High temperature and pressure solvent extractions were used to reduce the metal contamination to 300 ppm. Other methods were tested in effort to reduce the palladium metal content to similar levels using commonly known scavenging reagents, however the scavenging reagents were difficult to completely remove from the polymer samples and led to the presence of additional non-metal impurities. This technique was also used to separate a very polydisperse polymer sample into multiple molecular weight fractions. A gradient temperature was applied to the high pressure extraction, resulting in the separation of a single polymer sample into sixteen different fractions with MN ranging from 23 kDa to 123 kDa. Other advantages of this high pressure extraction technique include the ability to scale to large quantities; up to 100 g of polymer can be purified at one time. In addition, the solvent requirements to purify the samples are relatively small. In this study, four grams of material were extensively purified using 2 L of solvent, whereas a chromatography method such as preparative scale gel permeation chromatography would require much larger volumes of solvent and is not easily scalable.