A Cost-Effective, Column-Free Route to Ethylene Glycol Oligomers EG(6), EG(10), and EG(12)

Abstract

Although monodisperse ethylene glycol (EG) oligomers are important in a wide range of applications (ranging from drug therapeutics to materials science and engineering), their cost-especially for longer EG oligomers is often prohibitive. For example, decaethylene, EG(10), and dodecaethylene, EG(12), glycols cost hundreds of dollars per gram, and are only available from most vendors, including Sigma-Aldrich, in the polydispersed form. This high-cost is, in large part, due to laborious nature of synthesis and, above all, purification steps involved. Therefore, the motivation of our work was to design a cost-effective route to the EG oligomers that would altogether avoid the column-chromatography purification. This was achieved by a simple synthetic strategy, which combines bidirectional growth of the EG chains with the protection scheme using easy-to-remove trityl groups.