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Morphology evolution of polystyrene-core/poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)-shell microgel synthesized by one-pot polymerization

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Abstract

One-pot polymerization with macroinitiator is supposed to be a robust, facile way to synthesize well-defined core-shell nanoparticles with fixed shell thickness. To testify this, we investigated the temperature-depending morphology evolution of polystyrene (PS) core/poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) shell microgel synthesized by one-pot polymerization with PNIPAM-RAFT as macroinitiator in dimethylformamide (DMF) by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), dynamic/static light scattering (DLS/SLS) and small angle neutron scattering (SANS). It is revealed that the microgel has a core-shell structure, i.e., the core is made of pure PS, but the shell is composed of both PNIPAM-RAFT macroinitiator and crosslinked PS. In fact, there are 92.0 wt% D2O, 6.7 wt% PNIPAM and 1.3 wt% PS in the shell in its aqueous dispersion at 21 °C; therefore, its shell thickness is much larger than the extended chain length of the macroinitiator as revealed by both SANS and DLS observations. Competitive growth of styrene, divinylbenzene and PNIPAM macroinitiator as well as possible chain transfer from amine proton of PNIPAM side chain may lead to the larger shell thickness, compared with the extended chain length of the macroinitiator. Our work can shed light on the real morphology control in one-pot polymerization.

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Acknowledgements

We thank professor Zhao Hanying in Nankai University for the synthesis of the PS-core/PNIPAM-shell microgel.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Rubber-Plastics, Ministry of Education/Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Rubber-Plastics, School of Polymer Science and Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266042, China

    Wen-tao Hu & Hai-qing Hu  (胡海青)

  2. China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS), Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Dongguan, 523803, China

    Hua Yang & He Cheng  (程贺)

  3. Dongguan Institute of Neutron Science (DINS), Dongguan, 523808, China

    Hua Yang & He Cheng  (程贺)

Authors
  1. Wen-tao Hu
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  2. Hua Yang
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  3. He Cheng  (程贺)
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  4. Hai-qing Hu  (胡海青)
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to He Cheng  (程贺) or Hai-qing Hu  (胡海青).

Additional information

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21474119 and 21674020).

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Hu, Wt., Yang, H., Cheng, H. et al. Morphology evolution of polystyrene-core/poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)-shell microgel synthesized by one-pot polymerization. Chin J Polym Sci 35, 1156–1164 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10118-017-1969-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10118-017-1969-7

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