Chemical and rheological investigations of the sol-gel transition in organically-modified siloxanes

Ormosils are well-known organic-inorganic sol-gel derived materials also called heteropolysiloxanes. This paper presents two basic heteropolysiloxane structures where the organic part is either a short organic chain bridging two silicon atoms for the first material or an organic polymer backbone for the second. Their synthesis is detailed and a variety of experimental techniques (IR, ¹³C and ²⁹Si NMR and CP-MAS NMR, GPC) have been employed to investigate the chemical structure of these new materials. Their mechanical properties, more precisely their viscoelastic behaviour, have been evaluated using dynamic rheological techniques. The storage and loss moduli have been followed during the sol-gel transition at fixed and variable oscillation frequencies. The results have been correlated to the ²⁹Si CP-MAS NMR informations concerning the network polycondensation and compared to a pure inorganic sol-gel material prepared from tetraethoxysilane.