Abstract
A totally new approach in the synthesis of mixed polymer brushes tethered on polyamide (PA) surfaces is presented herein. As a proof of concept, two types of homopolymers were synthesized in sequential surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization (SI-ATRP) reactions: poly(methyl methacrylate)/poly((2-dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate) and polystyrene /poly((2-dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate). The ATRP initiator was immobilized on the surface through PA chain-end groups in two subsequent steps, separated by homo-polymerizations. The amount of the PA chains’ end groups available on the modified surface was tuned by the thermal rearrangement of the surface.
Highlights
Tethering polymer chains to a surface is a very useful synthetic strategy, as it allows extensive tuning of the surface properties by adjusting the composition, functionality or architecture of the tethered polymer chains, called polymer brushes
In the “grafting to” approach, the pre-synthesized polymer chains which contain an appropriate functional group located either at the chain end or along the polymer backbone are immobilized on the surface through the interactions between the available functional groups on the polymer and the surface [13]
The “grafting from” approach allows reaching a high grafting density of tethered polymer brushes, because the polymerization starts from the immobilized initiators [15] thereby allowing concurrent chain growth
Summary
Tethering polymer chains to a surface is a very useful synthetic strategy, as it allows extensive tuning of the surface properties by adjusting the composition, functionality or architecture of the tethered polymer chains, called polymer brushes. The characterization of MW and MWD is a challenge for cleaved polymer brushes from low surface area materials To overcome this problem, free/sacrificial initiators are usually introduced to the system and the polymerization from the surface and in the solution proceed in parallel. A new concept of mixed brush synthesis is introduced, as this kind of dual surface modified polymer brushes are usually obtained through tethering dual functionalized Y initiators on the substrate, followed by using two different polymerization mechanisms or through a grafting approach by using the mixture of two homopolymers [11,18,28,29,30,31,32,33,34]. The described novel procedure is very simple, does not require complicated synthetic procedures, neither for initiator synthesis nor the surface treatment, and can be accommodated to any polymeric supports containing chain-end functional groups
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