Hi everyone,
do you have some hints or a well established method for getting a polyethylene (PE) films with a molecules of interest (for the measurement) which will contain no (or possibly few) aggregates, crystallites etc.?
Swelling a 'ready-to-use' PE film with a solution (either drop-wise or by letting diffusion work by keeping PE soaked in the solution) doesn't work as a compound is unstable in most solvents and/or forms crystalites (or generally some non-isolated molecules' agglomerates).
What we have tried is melting PE or dissolving it either in toluene or chloroform (adding compound in the solution in either of those for a short time will not hurt a lot) and letting a solvent evaporate on a hotplate. But it doesn't work as, let's call it, 'film' (but rather crumbs) are brittle and pretty much useless (OK, at the moment, just completely useless).
Best regards,
Michał
Hello dear. Xylene is a better solvent for PE than toluene or chloroform. You can try by using this solvent. Another alternative is that you can dissolve PE in hot xylene and then precipitate it in methanol. This will let you obtain PE powder and the you can use it to obtain your film with a best dispersion of the interest molecules.
I like Edwin's idea, but an alternative might be cryogenic grinding (freezer milling) to obtain a well dispersed powder mixture, and then compression mold a PE disk.
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