RAFT Polymerization of Styrene and Maleimide in the Presence of Fluoroalcohol: Hydrogen Bonding Effects with Classical Alternating Copolymerization as Reference

Comprehensive studies of continuous flow reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer copolymerization and its application for photoimaging materials

Thorough studies of RAFT copolymerization in a continuous flow to gain deeper insights into kinetics, reactivity, and applicability were conducted with monomers and solvents utilizable for chemically amplified resist systems.

Unraveling Sequence Effect on Glass Transition Temperatures of Discrete Unconjugated Oligomers

Sequence plays a critical role in enabling unique properties and functions of natural biomolecules, which has promoted the rapid advancement of synthetic sequence-defined polymers in recent decades. Particularly, investigation of short chain sequence-defined oligomers (also called discrete oligomers) on their properties has become a hot topic. However, most studies have focused on discrete oligomers with conjugated structures. In contrast, unconjugated oligomers remain relatively underexplored. In this study, three pairs of discrete oligomers with the same composition but different sequence for each pair are employed for investigating their glass transition temperatures (T_g s). The resultant T_g s of sequenced oligomers in each pair are found to be significantly different (up to 11.6 °C), attributable to variations in molecular packing as demonstrated by molecular dynamics and density function theory simulations. Intermolecular interaction is demonstrated to have less impact on T_g s than intramolecular interaction. The mechanistic investigation into two model dimers suggests that monomer sequence caused the difference in intramolecular rotational flexibility of the sequenced oligomers. In addition, despite having different monomer sequence and T_g s, the oligomers have very similar solubility parameters, which supports their potential use as effective oligomeric plasticizers to tune the T_g s of bulk polymer materials.

Trends in Polymers 2017/2018: Polymer Synthesis

Polymer synthesis is a substantial area in polymer science and marks the starting point for all sorts of polymer materials that have a plethora of applications in everyday life but also in academic research [...].

Rotational spectra and theoretical study of tetramers and trimers of 2-fluoroethanol: dramatic intermolecular compensation for intramolecular instability

Cooperativity and chirality dominate in stabilizing the 2-fluoroethanol tetramer, thanks to a fully bifurcated C–H⋯F H-bond network.

Temperature programed photo-induced RAFT polymerization of stereo-block copolymers of poly(vinyl acetate)

Stereo-triblock copolymers of poly(vinyl acetate) are synthesized with controlled molecular weights based on a temperature-programed photo-induced RAFT in HFIP.