Synthesis and Characterization of Functionalized Polyethylene Surfaces

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9634196 Bergbreiter This grant will explore several new aspects of polyolefin surface modification. The initial stages of the proposed project will extend prior studies on "responsive" surfaces - surfaces that reversibly change hydrophilicity, adhesion and/or reactivity in response to external physical or chemical stimuli. By incorporating several different sorts of spectroscopic probes and by chemically tuning the structure of polymer grafts, it will be possible to test how to chemically control and manipulate solvation and reactivity at polymer surfaces. This chemistry will be explored with linear brush-like grafts. Second, a new approach to surface grafting using hyperbranched polymers will be studied. Preliminary work has already shown that hyperbranched grafting chemistry can generate heavily functionalized thin (10 - 150 nm) films of polymer grafts at surfaces. This chemistry can also be used to generate responsive surfaces and can, by design, incorporate spectroscopic labels either in the graft phase, at the graft/solvent interface or at the graft phase/substrate interface. Finally, known metallocene catalysts used in polypropylene polymerization make terminally functionalized stereoregular polypropylene oligomers readily available. Such oligomers can be synthetically modified and characterized using chemistry previously used to prepare terminally functionalized polyethylene oligomers. These terminally functionalized polypropylene oligomers will then be used to prepare surface functionalized polypropylene films by a blending approach whose utility has been established using polyethylene oligomers and a polyethylene host polymer. %%% This grant is in the area of polymer synthesis for design and modification of surfaces. This new approach to polypropylene functionalization can be used with the new sort s of chemical grafting chemistry to be developed in this proposal and in prior work. The result will be a new way to efficiently surface modify polypropylene. ***