International researchers have gone through the contents of their liquor cabinets to see if alcoholic drinks make good solvents for single-electron transfer living radical polymerisation (SET-LRP). And the answer is an unequivocal yes.
‘Everything worked’, says David Haddleton, leader of the 26 person team at the University of Warwick in the UK. Pimm’s, Guinness, Ouzo and a homemade Romanian brandy were just some of the beverages tested with everyone contributing something from their homeland.
SET-LRP is a technique used for the ultrafast synthesis of certain linear polymers, in this case polymers of N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM). ‘Living radical polymerisation has seen impressive developments over the past few years – the most attractive features of these systems are the fact that the livingness, or end-functionality, remains very high to essentially full conversion, which has enabled synthesis of complex high-order multiblock copolymers in recent previous work, as well as the typically very high polymerisation rate,’ explains Per Zetterlund, a radical polymerisation expert from the University of New South Wales in Australia. Zetterlund says Haddleton’s findings further demonstrate the robustness and versatility of the technique.
Interested to know more? Read the full article in Chemistry World here…
Absolut “copper catalyzation perfected”; robust living polymerization of NIPAM: Guinness is good for SET-LRP
David M. Haddleton et al.
Polym. Chem., 2014, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C3PY01075A, Communication
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