Thermally amendable tailor-made acrylate copolymers via RAFT polymerization and ultrafast alder-ene click chemistry

This investigation reports the preparation of thermally amendable copolymers of 2-hydroxyethylmethacrylate (HEMA) with methyl methacrylate (MMA) and butyl methacrylate (BMA) via reversible addition fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerization followed by Alder-ene reaction. The chemical compositions and molecular weights of the copolymers were determined via H-1 NMR and gel-permeation chromatography (GPC) analyses. The hydroxyl groups of PHEMA in the copolymer were modified to incorporate indole functional group, which was further modified via an ultrafast Alder-ene reaction using a bifunctional 1,2,4-triazoline-3,5-dione (TAD) derivative. The thermoreversible character of the resultant crosslinked network was studied via differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and FT-IR analyses. Different microscopic analyses were performed to study the self-healing property and self-healing efficiency of the crosslinked network. (c) 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part A: Polym. Chem. 2018, 56, 2310-2318