Abstract
Fluoropolymers constitute a specific class of polymers, with remarkable properties (high resistance to chemicals and heat, ferroelectricity and piezoelectricity for semi-crystalline polymers, to name a few). Fluoropolymers have found many industrial applications. However, fluoropolymers have not yet attracted all the interest they deserve from the scientific community. It is indeed difficult to prepare well-defined fluorinated polymeric architectures. The synthesis techniques developed and used so far allow the preparation of interesting architectures, but they suffer from two major drawbacks: 1) They do not allow access to high molar mass, and 2) The resulting architectures are ill-defined. As a result, physical chemistry studies of the phase segregation phenomena in films or in the bulk, or of the crystallization of fluorinated polymers were for the most part limited to homopolymers and blends. Similarly, very few studies of the self-assembly in solution of fluorinated polymeric architectures have been reported. Throughout deeper kinetic study, NMR characterizations and DFT calculation, this study reveals the remarkable efficiency of the RAFT polymerization to synthesize well-defined PVDF–based architectures. Self-assembly of PVDF-b-PVA block copolymers as well as polymerization-induced self-assembly of PVAc-b-PVDF block copolymers led to the first crystalline core/shell and desert-rose PVDF-based nanostructures.