Separation of parent homopolymers from poly(ethylene oxide) and polystyrene-based block copolymers by liquid chromatography under limiting conditions of desorption – 1. Determination of the suitable molar mass range and optimization of chromatographic con

• Parent homopolymers molar masses influence LC LCD separation.
• Low and high molar mass of parent homopolymers limit LC LCD separation.
• Adjusting some experimental parameters can push back the molar mass limits.
• LC LCD chromatographic conditions can be optimized easily.

We studied molar mass limits for the LC LCD separation of parent polystyrene (PS) and poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) homopolymers from PEO/PS based block copolymers and we identified optimized chromatographic conditions. Time delays between barriers and sample injections were 0–2–3′10. Eluent was composed of dimethylformamide (DMF) 40 wt.% and 1-chlorobutane (CLB) 60 wt.%; Barrier 1 (B1), which retained block copolymer, was composed of 100 wt.% CLB and Barrier 2 (B2), which retained PEO, was a mixture of DMF and CLB, which proportions were adjusted to studied block copolymers. With B2 composed of DMF 23 wt.% and CLB 77 wt.%, we obtained successful separation of PS23K-b-PEO35K-b-PS23K (56.5 wt.% of PS, the subscripts indicate the molar mass in kg mol−1 of each polymer part in the block copolymer) from its parent homopolymers. With B2 adjusted to DMF 30 wt.% and CLB 70 wt.%, PS2.3K-b-PEO3.1K (42.6 wt.% of PS) was also efficiently separated from its parent homopolymers.