Crosslinking of hydrophilic polymers using polyperoxides
- PDF / 3,672,858 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 71 Downloads / 203 Views
ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION
Crosslinking of hydrophilic polymers using polyperoxides Solomiia Borova 1 & Victor Tokarev 2 & Philipp Stahlhut 3 & Robert Luxenhofer 1,4 Received: 17 April 2020 / Revised: 21 August 2020 / Accepted: 23 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Hydrogels that can mimic mechanical properties and functions of biological tissue have attracted great interest in tissue engineering and biofabrication. In these fields, new materials and approaches to prepare hydrogels without using toxic starting materials or materials that decompose into toxic compounds remain to be sought after. Here, we report the crosslinking of commercial, unfunctionalized hydrophilic poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) using peroxide copolymers in their melt. The influence of temperature, peroxide copolymer concentration, and duration of the crosslinking process has been investigated. The method allows to create hydrogels from unfunctionalized polymers in their melt and to control the mechanical properties of the resulting materials. The design of hydrogels with a suitable mechanical performance is of crucial importance in many existing and potential applications of soft materials, including medical applications. Keywords Hydrogels . Radical crosslinking . Poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) . Thermal crosslinking . Peroxide containing copolymers
Introduction In the last decades, polymer hydrogels have drawn considerable attention as excellent soft materials with a wide variety of applications [1]. Hydrogels are a class of soft polymeric materials that have the ability to hold substantial amount of water, exhibit low interfacial tension, and can exhibit physical properties similar to those of living tissues [1–4]. Due to their permeability and biocompatibility (because of high water content), they have attracted much attention in the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields as key materials for various applications. Hydrogels are used, e.g., in drug delivery systems, tissue engineering materials, for contact lenses and protein separation, matrices for cell-encapsulation, cosmetic products or
* Robert Luxenhofer [email protected] 1
Functional Polymer Materials, Chair for Chemical Technology of Materials Synthesis, University of Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070 Würzburg, Germany
2
Department of Organic Chemistry, Lviv Polytechnic National University, S. Bandera str., 12, Lviv 79013, Ukraine
3
Department for Functional Materials in Medicine and Dentistry, University of Würzburg, Pleicherwall 2, 97070 Würzburg, Germany
4
Soft Matter Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
wound dressing, enzyme biosensors, chemical valves, metal particle preparation, and many more [5–14]. Hydrogels can be physically or chemically crosslinked. Inter alia, chemical crosslinking can be achieved by UV or reactive functional groups or enzymatic crosslinking [6, 8, 12, 15]. However, photo-polymerization requires a photo-sensitizer/initiator, suitable reactive groups on the polymer, and relatively high-ener
Data Loading...
