Review:Aggregation-Induced Emission——A New Tool to Study Polymer Thermodynamics and Kinetics

摘要

Polymer thermodynamics and kinetics are important components in the basic theory of polymer physics, which provide critical support for polymer processing and molding. As an important thermal analysis technology, differential scanning calorimetry(DSC) is a key way to explore the molecular motion of polymer chains, molecular structure, and condensed structure, greatly promoting the development of polymer materials. However, this technique is limited by its ambiguous results, because of inaccurate heat flow measurement and high parameter dependence. As an alternative strategy, aggregation-induced emission luminogens(AIEgens) have been extensively applied in various targets analysis and process monitoring, owing to their weak intermolecular interactions and highly twisted conformation. The optical properties of AIEgens are highly sensitive to the variations of the polymer microenvironment, including characteristic transition, crosslinking reaction, crystallization behavior, and phase separation. In this review, the progress of AIE technology in visualizing polymer molecular motion and structure evolution is summarized, compensating for the limitation of the traditional DSC method to facilitate further research in polymer science and engineering.