Hydrophobic modification of fir wood surface via low ppm ATRP strategy

A New Protocol for Ash Wood Modification: Synthesis of Hydrophobic and Antibacterial Brushes from the Wood Surface

“…The versatility and potential of this approach show that the native wood structure is preserved despite being modified with different types of polymer chains [8,13]. Both raw wood and wood fibers (elements that are extracted from wood) can be modified to improve selected performance criteria, e.g., hydrophobicity [14][15][16][17][18], strength [19][20][21][22][23], as well as antimicrobial properties [24][25][26][27][28][29].…”

“…Up to now, ATRP methods have been successfully used for raw wood modification only a few times [16,18,[40][41][42][43][44]. Poplar wood [16,40], spruce wood [41,44], waterlogged archaeological wood [42,43] and fir wood [18] were grafted with polymers to improve their properties, i.e., hydrophobicity [16,18,43], resistance to attack by fungi and termites, and antibacterial characteristics [40], controlled swelling behavior and tunable wettability [41,44], dimensional stability of wood, therefore preventing shrinkage, cracking and deformation [42]. The approaches ranged from both the classical high catalyst concentration ATRP technique [41,44] to the low ppm ATRP concepts, mainly activators regenerated by electron transfer (ARGET) ATRP with ascorbic acid as a reducing agent [16,40,42,43].…”

“…The approaches ranged from both the classical high catalyst concentration ATRP technique [41,44] to the low ppm ATRP concepts, mainly activators regenerated by electron transfer (ARGET) ATRP with ascorbic acid as a reducing agent [16,40,42,43]. Our previous investigation was focused on the modification of fir wood using supplemental activator and reducing agent (SARA) ATRP with copper wire (Cu 0 ) as a reducing agent, polymerizing hydrophobic monomers from wood structure [18]. Among the aforementioned techniques, SARA ATRP uses a reducing agent in the form of a solid chemical compound, thus, it is easily removed from the reaction mixture after polymerization and does not penetrate the wood structure.…”

“…In the SARA ATRP technique, the balance between the active and inactivated forms of the catalytic complex is established using metallic copper, which can adopt three oxidation states and acts as an auxiliary activator, which is described by the mechanism of comproportionation and disproportionation. This reaction system caused side reactions [18], and the control over the methyl methacrylate (MMA) polymerization was low. In this consideration, ARGET ATRP with the use of silver as a reducing agent turned out to be useful for the synthesis of functional macromolecules with a controlled and complex architecture [45,46].…”

Polymer-modified regenerated cellulose membranes: following the atom transfer radical polymerization concepts consistent with the principles of green chemistry

“…In this consideration, the atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) technique is especially privileged in the preparation of polymers with various architectures. The phenomenon of this method is associated with excellent control over molecular weight (MW), narrow molecular weight distribution (MWD) of received polymers (Chmielarz 2016;Qiao et al 2022;Yin et al 2021;Zaborniak et al 2021b), ability to incorporate functionality in specific macromolecule places (Chmielarz 2017;Grześ et al 2022;Matyjaszewski 2018), and possibilities for the optimization of a catalyst system (Fung and Coote 2021;Qiao et al 2022;Zhou et al 2022). The above-mentioned features of ATRP make that technique an adequate tool for the modification of cellulose membranes.…”