Polymer Chemistry Blog

Wen-Ming Wan and Cai-Yuan Pan have developed a strategy for preparing multiple nanostructural materials. The method creates the materials directly from controlled radical dispersion polymerization and polymerization-induced self-assembling and re-organization in one pot. Various morphologies including spherical micelles, nanowires, tubes, vesicles, large compound vesicles etc. can be prepared directly in this way.

Download the paper here to read the full method and experimental details.

A team led by James Batteas and David Bergbreiter at Texas A&M University, USA, have designed “smart” acrylamide copolymers with reversible redox behaviour which changes  lower critical solution temperature. The polymers are contain on N-isopropyl and 4-N-amino-2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidin-1-oxyl-4-yl (TEMPO) groups. Oxidation or reduction varies the copolymer’s lower critical solution temperature from 18 °C to 35–40 °C.

The team say that these smart polymers could lead to the design of redox-sensitive materials for drug delivery applications in vivo or in the synthesis of surfaces with redox-mediated wettability.

To find out more, why not download the article today?

Kenji Miyatake, Masahiro Watanabe and colleagues at the University of Yamanashi, Japan, synthesised ionomers as anion exchange membranes for alkaline fuel cell applications. The ionomers are based on poly(arylene ether)s containing quaternized ammonio-substituted fluorenyl groups.

The membranes were thermally stable up to 180 °C under nitrogen and mechanically stable with 48 MPa of the maximum stress at 80 °C and 60% relative humidity. High hydroxide ion conductivity up to 50 mS cm−1 was achieved at 30 °C in water for the ionomer membrane bearing sulfone/ketone structures and the highest IEC (2.54 meq. g−1). The membranes were durable in hot water (80 °C) for 1000 hours. The properties of the ionomer membranes make them promising candidates as an anion exchange membrane for alkaline fuel cells the team say.

Interested to know more? Read the full article:

Manabu Tanaka, Masaki Koike, Kenji Miyatake and Masahiro Watanabe, Polym. Chem., 2011, DOI: 10.1039/C0PY00238K