A study on the blending effect of polyvinyledene fluoride in the ionic transport mechanism of plasticized polyvinyl chloride + lithium perchlorate gel polymer electrolytes

The gel polymer electrolytes composed of the blend of polyvinylchloride (PVC) and polyvinylidene fluoride (PVdF) as host polymers, the mixture of ethylene carbonate (EC) and propylene carbonate (PC) as a plasticizer, and LiClO₄ as a salt was studied. An attempt was made to investigate the effect of PVdF in the plasticized PVC + LiClO₄ system in three blend ratios. The differential scanning calorimetry study confirms the formation of polymer–salt complex and miscibility of the PVC and PVdF. The X-ray diffraction results of plasticized PVC (S1, S2, S3) and PVdF-blended films (S4, S5, S6) were compared, in that an increase in PVC concentration decreases the degree of crystallinity for S1 and S3, respectively, but drastically increases for PVC (S2). The increase in PVC content has not accounted in the conductivity studies also noted. However, the blending effect of PVdF showed decreases in crystallinity homogeneously for (S6 > S5 > S4), which were reflected in ionic conductivity measurements. The surface morphology of the films were also studied by scanning electron microscope, and it corroborates the same. Paper presented at the Third International Conference on Ionic Devices (ICID 2006), Chennai, Tamilnadu, India, Dec. 7–9, 2006.