Synthesis, characterization, and structure-property relationships of aromatic polyimides containing 4,4′-diaminotriphenylmethane

This work reports two series of structurally different aromatic polyimides based on 4,4´-diaminodiphenylmethane (DPM) and 4,4´-diaminotriphenylmethane (TPM) and three commercial dianhydrides. All TPM-based polyimides formed membranes due to their high molecular weight (inherent viscosities ~0.93–1.14 dl/g), they exhibited high thermal stability (5 %: 490–544 °C), glass transition temperatures between 269 and 293 °C, and reasonable mechanical properties. The incorporation of pendant phenyl moieties in the TPM-based polyimides has a strong effect producing an improvement in solubility, thermal stability, density and gas permeability coefficient in comparison with DPM-based polyimides. The most interesting polyimide TPM-6FDA, containing phenyl and trifluoromethyl as bulky pendant groups, showed higher gas permeability coefficient for CO2 (23.73 Barrer) and the best ideal selectivity to the gas pair CO2/CH4 (α = 28.93).