Effects of multifunctional thiol monomers and BaTiO3 nanoparticles on electro-optical and dielectric properties of polymer dispersed liquid crystal films

•Effect of monomer functionalities and BaTiO3 on electro-optical and dielectric properties.•Key parameters of the electro-optical and dielectric properties of PDLC are evaluated.•Hybrid combination of 6-SH thiol monomer with BaTiO3 NPs for improved PDLC films. Recently, there has been considerable attention directed towards smart windows utilizing polymer dispersed liquid crystals (PDLC) composites due to their electrical switchable properties. However, their widespread application is limited by higher driving voltage, lower dielectric constant, poor contrast, slower response time, higher relaxation time, and activation energy. In this study, we introduced pioneering PDLC composite films using polymerization induced phase separation (PIPS) technique containing nematic liquid crystal HPC21300-000 (LC300), multifunctional thiol monomers (Trimethylolpropane Tris(3-mercaptopropionate), pentaerythritol tetrakis (3-mercaptoacetate), dipentaerythritol hexakis (3-mercaptopropionate)) and BaTiO3 (BTO) nanoparticles to improve the electro-optical and dielectric properties. The polarizing optical microscope (POM) and SEM were employed to study how variations in monomer functionality and BTO doping influence the morphology of LC droplets. The prepared PDLC films with the thiol monomer (Dipentaerythritol hexakis (3-mercaptopropionate)) have shown significant improvement in electro-optical and dielectric performance with 0.05 % and 0.1 % BTO doping. The dielectric relaxation of PDLC films were investigated utilizing a precision impedance analyzer across frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 20 MHz and temperatures spanning from 25 to 110 °C.