The influence of alkyl acrylate comonomers in the rank of methyl- (MA), butyl- (BA), ethylhexyl- (EGA), and lauryl- (LA) in ternary copolymers based on acrylonitrile, alkyl acrylate and acrylamide (PAN-alkyl acrylate) on their solutions rheological behavior in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), and mechanical properties of the spun fibers have been investigated. To reveal the role of molecular weight, two series of copolymers with molecular weights of ~50 and 150 kg/mol have been studied. It was shown that the nature of the alkyl acrylate does not significantly affect the rheological behavior of their solutions regardless of the length of the alkyl substituent and the content of the alkyl acrylate in copolymers. An exception is the high-molecular PAN-LA, which is characterized by a non-Newtonian behavior at lower concentrations. Two series of fibers were spun from the characterized ranks of low and high-molecular-weight copolymer solutions. For all copolymers, a 2.5-5-fold increase in the strength and elastic modulus of the fiber was found with an increase in Mw. It has been shown that PAN-MA and PAN-LA fibers have a tensile strength of 800 MPa that is 1.5-3 times higher than that of other copolymers spun in the same conditions.
Keywords: acrylamide; alkyl acrylate; comonomer sequence; fiber spinning; polyacrylonitrile; reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer polymerization; rheology.