Data from: Improved elastic recovery from ABC triblock terpolymers

The promise of ABC triblock terpolymers for improving the mechanical
properties of thermoplastic elastomers is demonstrated by comparison with
symmetric ABA/CBC analogs having similar molecular weights and volume
fraction of B and A/C domains. It is shown that the ABC architecture
enhances elasticity (up to 98% recovery over 10 cycles) in part through
essentially full chain bridging between discrete hard domains leading to
minimization of mechanically unproductive loops. In addition, the unique
phase space of ABC triblocks also enables the fraction of hard-block
domains to be higher (fhard ≈ 0.4) while maintaining elasticity, which is
traditionally only possible with non-linear architectures or highly
asymmetric ABA triblock copolymers. These advantages of ABC triblock
terpolymers provide a tunable platform to create materials with practical
applications while improving our fundamental understanding of chain
conformation and structure–property relationships in block copolymers.