Readily Processable High Performance Liquid Crystalline Block Copolymer with Mesoscale Phase Separation

Special engineering plastics have attracted significant attention in various fields. Liquid crystalline polyarylate (LCP), as a high-performance reinforcing material, shows great potential as a component of composites thanks to its fluidity and in situ enhancement effect. However, the incompatibility between LCP and other components leads to an inevitable optical-microscale (1–100 μm) phase separation, thus deteriorating the comprehensive properties of composites. To address this challenge, we prepared aromatic liquid crystalline block copoly(arylateketone)s through simple one-pot polycondensation. The fabricated block copolymer overcomes optical-microscale phase separation and exhibits unique mesoscale (1–100 nm) phase separation through selecting monomers with distinct reactivities. The poly(arylateketone) showed excellent thermal (glass transition temperatures ∼180 °C) and mechanical (flexural strengths ∼150 MPa) properties that are comparable to commercial special engineering plastics, while exhibiting facile processability (complex viscosities ∼4.97 × 102 Pa·s at 320 °C). This study provides a new way of modulating material properties and will inspire the development of advanced high-performance materials.