Dynamic Behavior of Heavy Water Inside and Outside of Poly (<i>N</i>-Isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) Microgel Using Broadband Dielectric Spectroscopy

Balachandar, V.; Takatsuka, Masanobu; Kita, R.; Shinyashiki, Naoki; Yagihara, Shin; Rathnasabapathy, Sampathkumar

doi:10.1109/tdei.2023.3261832

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Frontiers in Soft Matter frontiersin.org 0.2-0.4 (Lele et al, 1997), 1.8 (Vorob'ev andFaleev, 2005), 4.5 (Balachandar et al, 2023), 6 (Philipp et al, 2014), and 8 (Heskins and Guillet, 1968) were reported. However, it should be mentioned in this context that these values may characterise metastable states because waiting-time dependent T 2 measurements indicated that the captured water molecules are expelled from the pNIPAM globules on the time scale of ~4 days (Starovoytova and Spěváček, 2006).…”

Section: Field Cycling Relaxometrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several studies have set out to describe the water behaviour across the LCST of pNIPAM (gels) using, e. g., neutron scattering (Maccarrone et al, 2014;Hammouda et al, 2015;Niebuur et al, 2019), dielectric spectroscopy (Shiraga et al, 2015;Vijayakumar et al, 2022;Balachandar et al, 2023), differential scanning calorimetry (Lai et al, 2013) and molecular dynamics simulations (Podewitz et al, 2019). An inherent problem of these approaches is that the water fraction interacting with the polymer is small in the dilute or semi-dilute regimes and, hence, it is difficult to single out signal contributions, which directly inform about the pNIPAMwater interaction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Water dynamics in solutions of linear poly (N-isopropyl acrylamide) studied by 2H NMR field-cycling relaxometry

Säckel,

von Klitzing,

Siegel

et al. 2024

Front. Soft Matter

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We use 2H nuclear magnetic resonance to study the dynamics of deuterated water in a solution of linear poly (N-isopropyl acrylamide) (pNIPAM, 4 wt%) across its coil-to-globule transition at a lower critical solubility temperature (LCST) around 32°C. In agreement with previous studies, we find that the 2H spin-lattice (T1) and, in particular, spin-spin (T2) relaxation times abruptly decrease when heating through the LCST, indicating that the polymer collapse causes an emergence of a water fraction with strongly reduced mobility. To quantify the dynamics of this slow water fraction, we exploit the fact that 2H field-cycling relaxometry allows us to measure the spectral density of the water reorientation in a broad frequency range. We find that the slow water fraction is characterised by a broad logarithmic Gaussian distribution of correlation times (σLG = 2.3), which is centred about τLG ≈ 10–9 s near the LCST. Hence, the common assumption of a Debye spectral density does not apply. We argue that a minor water fraction, which is located inside the pNIPAM globules and shows dynamics governed by the disordered polymer matrix, accompanies a major water fraction with bulk-like dynamics above the LCST. The former fraction amounts to about 0.4 water molecules per NIPAM monomer. Several findings indicate fast exchange between these bound and free water fractions on the T1 and T2 time scales.

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