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The combination of polymer and ionic liquid (IL) is attracting increasing attention because of its versatile and tunable properties. In this paper, the IL 1-(2-hydroxyethyl)-3-methylimidazolium chloride (HOEtMIMCl), which has a complementary structure with poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA), was adopted to act as a novel plasticizer for PVA to improve its thermal processability. The results demonstrated that the hydroxyl group and Cl– in the IL formed strong hydrogen bonds with the hydroxyl groups of PVA, thus efficiently confining its crystallization, decreasing its melting point, and obtaining a wide thermal processing window, up to 110 °C. The resultant PVA/IL composites showed high ionic conductivity, up to 2.82 × 10–3 S/cm, and considerable flexible mechanical properties with an elongation at break of 317% when the IL content was 35 wt %, opening the potential applications of PVA in the field of flexible semisolid state electric double-layer supercapacitors (EDLC) and proton exchange membranes (PEM).
Chen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.