The solution structure of liquid-crystal polymers with small liquid-crystal thermoset maleimides and nadimides

The solution structure of the deuterated liquid-crystal polyamide polymer (LCP) poly(p-phenylene-2-nitroterephthalamide), alone and mixed with small, rodlike, amide, liquid-crystal molecules (LCT) in N-methyl-2-pyrrolidinone (NMP), is studied using small-angle neutron scattering. Measurements were made as a function of LCP concentration using different LCTs mixed at 20 and 40 wt% relative to LCP. Our motivation for studying this system comes from a need to connect solution structure with film morphology in processing these materials for high-performance molecular composites. Our analysis shows that LCP in NMP forms large domain-like structures. The presence of LCT breaks up the LCP domains into smaller structures, some of which are filamentous LCP-LCT aggregates. This result suggests that the simple entropic description of the solution behavior of mixtures of long and short rods is not adequate in describing systems of this type