Latent Self-Immolative Polymers, A New Class of Materials Synthesized Through Active Templating
Standing
Undergraduate
Type of Proposal
Oral Presentation
Faculty
Faculty of Science
Proposal
Self-immolative polymers (SIPs), materials that spontaneously depolymerize monomer unit by monomer unit at room temperature, have been developed only over the past decade. These molecules can be stabilized indefinitely simply by attaching an “end-cap” to one end of the polymer after it is made. When this end-cap is removed, the polymer degrades completely over a period of hours or days-only one bond needs to be broken through an external stimulus, the polymer unzips the rest on its own. However, this inevitably leads to the core challenge in the synthesis of SIPs: the forward polymerization reaction is necessarily in competition with the reverse reaction. If the polymerization bond-formation reactivity can be decoupled from the depolymerization reactivity, a highly stable living polymer can be produced that cannot self-immolate until activated. Rather than purely using an end-cap to keep the polymer intact until stimuli removal, the addition of the end-cap itself will enable the nature of degradation of the polymer backbone as a SIP. This new class of SIP are called Latent Self-immolate polymers (LSIPs). This presentation will discuss our progress towards these molecules and their synthesis as pseudorotaxanes through an active-templating approach.
Grand Challenges
Sustainable Industry
Latent Self-Immolative Polymers, A New Class of Materials Synthesized Through Active Templating
Self-immolative polymers (SIPs), materials that spontaneously depolymerize monomer unit by monomer unit at room temperature, have been developed only over the past decade. These molecules can be stabilized indefinitely simply by attaching an “end-cap” to one end of the polymer after it is made. When this end-cap is removed, the polymer degrades completely over a period of hours or days-only one bond needs to be broken through an external stimulus, the polymer unzips the rest on its own. However, this inevitably leads to the core challenge in the synthesis of SIPs: the forward polymerization reaction is necessarily in competition with the reverse reaction. If the polymerization bond-formation reactivity can be decoupled from the depolymerization reactivity, a highly stable living polymer can be produced that cannot self-immolate until activated. Rather than purely using an end-cap to keep the polymer intact until stimuli removal, the addition of the end-cap itself will enable the nature of degradation of the polymer backbone as a SIP. This new class of SIP are called Latent Self-immolate polymers (LSIPs). This presentation will discuss our progress towards these molecules and their synthesis as pseudorotaxanes through an active-templating approach.