Blue Light-Initiated Alcoholic RAFT Dispersion Polymerization of Benzyl Methacrylate: A Detailed Study.

Dongdong Liu,Jianbo Tan,Hao Sun,Li Zhang,Ruiming Zeng

doi:10.3390/polym11081284

Abstract

Blue light-initiated alcoholic reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) dispersion polymerization of benzyl methacrylate (BzMA) using bis (acyl) phosphane oxide (BAPO) as the photo-initiator is developed to prepare diblock copolymer nano-objects. High monomer conversion (95%) was achieved within 2 h of blue light irradiation in an isopropanol/water mixture. Effects of solvent, light intensity, and reaction temperature on the polymerization kinetics were evaluated. Finally, the effect of reaction temperature on the morphologies of diblock copolymer nano-objects was investigated and two morphological phase diagrams were constructed at 25 and 70 °C. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) measurement confirmed that increasing the reaction temperature promoted the evolution of higher order morphology. We believe this study will provide more mechanistic insights into alcoholic RAFT dispersion polymerization for the creation of diblock copolymer nano-objects with well-defined structures.

Highlights

Solution self-assembly of block copolymers is a versatile method to produce block copolymer nano-objects with different morphologies, including spheres, cylindrical micelles, vesicles, lamellae etc., [1,2,3]
The non-zero y-intercept is attributed to the mPEG45 -CDPA, which has a Mn value of 3.7 kg/mol as measured by THF GPC. These results suggest that good control was maintained in the blue light-initiated alcoholic reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) dispersion polymerization when using bis (acyl) phosphane oxide (BAPO) as the photo-initiator
We explored the effect of light intensity on the blue light-initiated alcoholic RAFT dispersion polymerization of benzyl methacrylate (BzMA)