Understanding the stability and degradation mechanisms of organic solar materials is critically important to achieving long device lifetimes. Here, an investigation of the photodegradation of polymer:fullerene blend fi lms exposed to ambient conditions for a variety of polymer and fullerene derivative combinations is presented. Despite the wide range in polymer stabilities to photodegradation, ...

The Sp diastereomer of thymidine 5'-O-(1-thiotriphosphate) was polymerized by avian myeloblastosis virus reverse transcriptase using poly(A) . d(pT)10 as template-primer. Degradation of the template poly(A) by alkaline hydrolysis and isolation by gel chromatography gave a single-stranded poly(d(p(S)T)), a polymer of thymidine 5'-phosphorothioate. To determine the configuration of the phosphorot...

Polymer solar cells are a promising alternative to more traditional silicon solar cells. This is mainly due to the good solubility of organic semiconductors, which makes it possible to produce large-scale and mechanically flexible devices with roll-to-roll processes. To be able to fully utilise this promising technique the stability of the materials, used in these devices, must be guaranteed. T...

Thermooxidative degradation of poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) is inevitable during processing of PVC. Recycling of this polymer requires reprocessing in most of the cases, and due to the low thermal stability of PVC, it is of paramount importance to reveal the effect of thermooxidation on the thermal stability of this commercially important polymer. However, detailed systematic investigations are l...

The principal effects of mass degradation on polymer matrix composites (PMCs) are the decay of mechanical properties such as strength, elongation, and resilience. This degradation is a common problem of the PMCs under thermal cycling conditions. In this article, composite degradation was investigated by measurement of total mass loss (TML) using the Taguchi approach. Thermal cycling tests were ...