Thermoresponsive copolymer microgels

Abstract

Colloidal aqueous microgels have attracted notable attention due to their possible applications in both polymer chemistry and the (bio)material sector. Due to their soft internal network structure and their response to different external stimuli, they are suitable as carrier systems for different kinds of molecules (e.g. nanoparticles, drugs, diagnostic agents, and enzymes), as optically active materials or even as model systems for fundamental research on soft condensed matter. Within the class of microgels, a variety of molecular structures is possible. The aim of this manuscript is to review recent progress in the domain of copolymer microgels with different architectures. Although most of the work is based on microgels with poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) (NIPAM) as one component, non-NIPAM based copolymer systems are also presented and discussed.

Azide–alkyne cycloaddition reactions in water via recyclable heterogeneous Cu catalysts: reverse phase silica gel and thermoresponsive hydrogels

“…At temperatures higher than 47 C, hydrogen bonds between the polymer and solvent molecules become weak and the polymer coils around itself, shrinking in size as intramolecular hydrogen bonding becomes signicant. 59,60 This mechanism was proposed for the coil-toglobule transition of polymer coils that took place in hydrophilic solvents (Fig. 5).…”

Volume phase transition in thermo-responsive hydrogels: constitutive modeling and structure–property relations

“…Given a concentration of monomers, coefficients a 1 and a 2 in the Landau expansion decrease exponentially with C cr (Figs. 3,9,11,14). For a given concentration of cross-linker, these coefficients grow with C mon (Figs.…”

“…These relations are applied to study equilibrium water uptake under unconstrained and constrained swelling in Sect. 3. Results of simulation are compared with the experimental data in Sect.…”

Equilibrium swelling of core–shell composite microgels

“…Microgels (stable polymer colloid particles with diameter not exceeding 1 mm dispersed in water or organic solvents) provide a special class of hydrogels [2][3][4][5]. These structures are synthesized by means of emulsion polymerization, dispersion polymerization, precipitation polymerization on precursor particles, microemulsion polymerization, and living polymerization techniques such as reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer and atom transfer radical polymerization [3,6].…”