Interplay between Hydrogen Bonding and Macromolecular Architecture Leading to Unusual Phase Behavior in Thermosensitive Microgels

Thermoresponsive Synergistic Hydrogen Bonding Switched by Several Guest Units in a Water‐Soluble Polymer

“…This implies that inserting H‐bonding units into a water‐soluble polymer can induce thermoresponsive behavior. Moreover, Richtering and coworkers10 reported that given at essentially equivalent units, the critical phase transition temperature of (NIPAM‐ co ‐ N , N ‐diethylacrylamide) microgel was lower than those of the corresponding homopolymers, and the units in a direct neighborhood were crucial for the H‐bonding triggered phase transition 11. Accordingly, we expect that the inserting of several guest H‐bonding units into a water‐soluble polymer should induce thermoresponsive behavior.…”

Cononsolvency of mono- and di-alkyl N-substituted poly(acrylamide)s and poly(vinyl caprolactam)

“…The theory of preferential adsorption by Tanaka and co-workers is one of them [43,44]; it was applied successfully to PNIPAM microgels recently [41]. PNIPAM is able to form intramolecular Hbonds because its monomer unit possesses both donor and acceptor functions [45,46]. COSMO-RS [47] (conductor-like screening model for real solvents) allows the predictive calculation of chemical potentials in almost arbitrary mixtures, including polymers [48] and therefore the calculation of other thermodynamic data, e.g.…”

EPR Spectroscopy Provides a Molecular View on Thermoresponsive Dendronized Polymers Below the Critical Temperature

“…There have been considerable research efforts to gain a better understanding about the processes which take place when the polymer collapses and stable mesoglobules are formed. [9][10][11][12][13][14][15] However, it is still poorly understood what happens on the nanoscopic scale when thermoresponsive polymers start to dehydrate at a certain temperature, subsequently collapse and assemble into mesoglobules.…”