Cooperative H-bonding on the Topology Controlled Polyether toward Advanced Adhesive Materials

Abstract

As a crucial molecular interaction in nature, hydrogen bonding (H-bonding) is important to express their own characteristic and unique phenomena such as RNA, DNA, and protein. Inspired by this remarkable feature in H-bonding, a lot of researches have been done to design and synthesize novel functional materials and polymers including self-assembly supra-molecules, polymer blends and nanocomposites displaying interesting thermal and mechanical properties. Herein, we successfully introduced the carbonyl benzoic acid group that can induce the cooperative H-bonding in the topology controlled PGs (i.e. linear, hyper-branched, and branched cyclic types) to synthesis poly(glycidoxy carbonyl benzoic acid)s (PGCBAs)) via the simple post-polymerization process while showing high conversion in a short time. In the synthesis process, we here present a new strategy for enhancing the conversion from post-polymerization using DBU via nucleophilic catalysis mechanism. The obtained topology controlled PGCBAs contain H-bonding donor and acceptor in a single repeating unit that can induce the intramolecular and intermolecular H-bonding and they were characterized by NMR, GPC and show the interesting phenomena in the bulk and the solution state depending on the polymer topologies. The high synergistic interaction from the intermolecular and intramolecular H-bonding in the topology-controlled PGCBAs show interesting pH sensitive properties in the solution phase and stronger adhesion strength in the bulk phase compared to the conventional adhesives by the secondary interaction. We prove that it is possible to improve the adhesive performance by adjusting and controlling the interaction of H-bonding between polymer chains by simply mixing each of functional groups and topologies. Therefore, why it is important to control the topologies of a polymer, and different properties can be exhibited with the same chemical structure. Finally, as a result of the cell viability assay, we expect that PGCBAs can be used in biological fields owing to its excellent biocompatibility