Issue 45, 2020

Defect engineering of polyethylene-like polyphosphoesters: solid-state NMR characterization and surface chemistry of anisotropic polymer nanoplatelets

Abstract

Anisotropic materials with very high aspect ratios, such as nanoplatelets, are an exciting class of materials due to their unique properties based on their unilamellar geometry. Controlling their size and surface-functionality is challenging and has only be achieved in some cases for synthetic polymers. We present a general approach to prepare polymer-nanoplatelets with control over the lateral size and basal functionality, by simple polycondensation of precisely spaced and functional phosphate groups in polyethylene-like polymers. Because of the relatively large size of the phosphate groups, they are expelled from the bulk crystal to the basal surface. This allows to control the chain-folding during crystallization, which we analyzed via solid-state NMR and TEM. Furthermore, we present chemistry “on the surface” of the platelets: the pendant ester group at the phosphate offers the possibility to introduce functional groups accessible for further chemical modification on the crystal surface. This is shown by introducing a 2-acetylthioethyl ester group and subsequently cleaving this 2-acetylthioethyl ester group to the free P–OH. Together, these results render polyethylene-like polyphosphoesters a versatile platform for soft-matter nanoplatelets as functional colloids.

Graphical abstract: Defect engineering of polyethylene-like polyphosphoesters: solid-state NMR characterization and surface chemistry of anisotropic polymer nanoplatelets

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
18 Sep 2020
Accepted
28 Okt 2020
First published
29 Okt 2020
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Polym. Chem., 2020,11, 7235-7243

Defect engineering of polyethylene-like polyphosphoesters: solid-state NMR characterization and surface chemistry of anisotropic polymer nanoplatelets

J. C. Markwart, O. Suraeva, T. Haider, I. Lieberwirth, R. Graf and F. R. Wurm, Polym. Chem., 2020, 11, 7235 DOI: 10.1039/D0PY01352H

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements