Water contaminant: Use it but do not shield it to synthesize co-polymers with multiple emission colours.

Abstract

Due to the high affinity with water molecules, amide compounds are easily contaminated by moisture; therefore, the water interference effect cannot be totally excluded from the amide-involved reactions. Thus, the perfect solution is to use the interference effect but not shield it in a real application. In this work, we introduced different contents of sodium acrylate (AAS) to scavenge water from the monomers of N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAm) when copolymerized with TPA-Vinyl-4CN. Herein, water molecules play a role as nucleophilic reagents to attack highly active functional groups as -C=C-CN from TPA-Vinyl-4CN, leading to a blue emissive TPA-Vinyl-2CHO. From this study, we made a deep awareness of the interactions between three reaction partners of AAS and NIPAm as well as TPA-Vinyl-4CN. Our results clearly demonstrated the fact that water can be perfectly used and controlled by the water absorbent of AAS, developing a new approach to synthesizing multiple emission-coloured polymers by using only one luminogen of TPA-Vinyl-4CN.