0000000000408631
AUTHOR
Willi Schmolke
Enhancement of metallo-supramolecular dissociation kinetics in telechelic terpyridine-capped poly(ethylene glycol) assemblies in the semi-dilute regime.
The dynamics of supramolecular polymer assemblies is governed by that of their polymeric building blocks and that of the transient bonds between them. Entrapment of such bonds by topological crowding often causes renormalization of the bond lifetimes towards prolonging. In the present study, by contrast, we show that this effect can also be inverse in the case of telechelic metallo-supramolecular polymers in semi-dilute solution. We focus on linear poly(ethylene glycols) capped by terpyridine binding motifs at both ends that can form metal–ligand coordinative bonds with various transition metal ions, thereby creating transient metallo-supramolecular assemblies of varying length and binding …
Core-Shell Microgels with Switchable Elasticity at Constant Interfacial Interaction.
Hydrogels based on poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAAm) exhibit a thermo-reversible volume phase transition from swollen to deswollen states. This change of the hydrogel volume is accompanied by changes of the hydrogel elastic and Young's moduli and of the hydrogel interfacial interactions. To decouple these parameters from one another, we present a class of submillimeter sized hydrogel particles that consist of a thermosensitive pNIPAAm core wrapped by a nonthermosensitive polyacrylamide (pAAm) shell, each templated by droplet-based microfluidics. When the microgel core deswells upon increase of the temperature to above 34 °C, the shell is stretched and dragged to follow this deswelling i…
Dominance of Chain Entanglement over Transient Sticking on Chain Dynamics in Hydrogen-Bonded Supramolecular Polymer Networks in the Melt
The chain dynamics in supramolecular polymer networks is determined by the interplay of the kinetics of transient interchain association and relaxation of the network chains themselves. This interplay can be addressed by studying model supramolecular polymer networks in which the number of associative side groups and the molar mass of the covalently jointed backbone polymers are both varied systematically. To realize this idea, we use precursor chains with three different molar masses, which comes along with different extents of entanglement in the melt state. For each molar mass, the precursor polymers are functionalized with three different relative contents of associative side groups, gi…