Preparation of High-performance Polyimide Fibers with Wholly Rigid Structures Containing Benzobisoxazole Moieties

In this work, a fully rigid coplanar symmetric heterocyclic unit was introduced into the rigid polyimide macromolecular backbone structure to prepare high-performance polyimide fibers. The novel co-polyimide(co-PI) fibers based on 3,3’,4,4’-biphenyltetracarboxylic anhydride(BPDA), p-phenylenediamine(PDA) and 2,6-(4,4’-diaminodiphenyl) benzo[1,2-d:5,4-d’] bisoxazole(PBOA) were fabricated via a twostep wet-spinning method. The effects of benzobisoxazole moiety on spinnability, aggregation structure, and mechanical properties of fibers were systematically discussed. The detailed structural analysis revealed that the well-defined aggregation structures of co-PI fibers were obtained from initial amorphous structure when post hot-drawing temperature was higher than 460 °C under proper drawing ratio, and the incorporation PBOA into BPDA-PDA structures produced more compact structural co-PI fiber than homo BPDA-PDA fiber. The BPDA-PDA/PBOA co-PI fibers exhibited optimum tensile strength and modulus of 2.65 and 103 GPa, which increased by 182% and 84% compared to the homo BPDA-PDA fiber, respectively.