Novel vinyl-co-ester polymers by ring opening polymerizations and metal catalyzed polymerizations

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The project aims at the generation of new materials by bringing polar ester linkages onto the vinyl polymer backbones (Figure 1) with modified physical and chemical properties besides having significant influence on their degradability behavior. Also, we aim at gaining basic understanding of their formation and structure-property-relationship studies in terms of the amount of the ester linkages and microstructure of copolymers and degradability (enzymatic and hydrolytic etc.), mechanical, optical and thermal properties of the resulting copolymers. For the purpose, 1. Combination of free radical ring opening polymerization and chain polymerization: Copolymerization of cyclic ketene acetals with vinyl monomers. 2. Combination of metal catalyzed ring opening polymerization of cyclic esters and vinyl monomers are proposed as synthetic strategies. Depending on the resulting physical and chemical properties these new materials can be substituted for the conventional polymers in various applications like encapsulants or drug carriers for biomedical applications, coating applications, formation of disintegrate thermosets and for the generation of aliphatic degradable ionomers as novel method with improved mechanical properties. They can also bring some specific advantages like introducing biodegradability into non-biodegradable materials and can improve thermal stability and impact behavior of polymers like PMMA, which is otherwise a brittle material and degrades by unzipping mechanism. The new materials could be of interest from after use degradability point-of-view also.