Investigation on the overlapping bands of syndiotactic polystyrene by using 2D-IR spectroscopy

• 2DIR spectra was applied to investigate highly overlapping bands of sPS.
• A sample-specific experiment was designed and conducted in the study.
• The ∼900 cm−1 band is composed of two sub-bands.
• The trans-planar conformation band at 1223 cm−1 turned out to consist of two bands.

In this work, WAXD and FTIR spectroscopy were utilized to investigate the phase transition of syndiotactic polystyrene (sPS) from amorphous phase to mesophase during the isothermal annealing process at 130 °C. Two dimensional (2D) correlation infrared spectroscopy was applied to reveal the sub-bands from the highly overlapping bands. The ∼900 cm−1 band is shown to be composed of two sub-bands. One band located around 906 cm−1 corresponds to the amorphous phase, another peak that occurs around 900 cm−1 is associated with mesophase. The trans-planar conformation band at 1223 cm−1 turns out to consist of two bands which might be related to trans-planar conformation with different sequence lengths.

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