Copolymer fingerprints of polystyrene-block-polyisoprene by MALDI-ToF-MS

MALDI-ToF-MS mass spectra of copolymers contain a lot of information on both chain length distribution (CLD) and chemical composition distribution (CCD). In this paper an approach for extracting detailed information from a MALDI-ToF-MS mass spectrum is presented that enables the study of microstructure for copolymers. More specifically, this paper is dealing with a polystyrene-blockpolyisoprene copolymer, in which the growth of the second block is followed with MALDI-ToF-MS as a function of conversion. The technique is compared to H-1 NMR for the evaluation of average chemical compositions, revealing that ionization efficiencies do not influence the obtained mass spectra. It is shown that MALDI-ToF-MS can extract detailed information on the chain length distributions (CLDs) for both polystyrene and polyisoprene blocks. Using random coupling statistics, it is shown that the proposed analysis yields results with a high accuracy.