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

该项目旨在通过在乙烯基聚合物骨架（图1）上引入极性酯键来生成新材料，这些材料的物理和化学性质得到了改变，同时对其可降解性行为产生了重大影响。此外，我们的目标是获得基本的了解他们的形成和结构-性能-关系研究方面的酯键的数量和共聚物的微观结构和降解性（酶和水解等），所得共聚物的机械，光学和热性能。为了这个目的，1。自由基开环聚合和链式聚合的结合：环烯酮缩醛与乙烯基单体的共聚。2. 提出了金属催化开环聚合环酯和乙烯基单体的合成策略。根据所产生的物理和化学性能，这些新材料可以取代传统聚合物在各种应用中的应用，如生物医学应用的封装剂或药物载体，涂层应用，分解热固性物的形成以及作为具有改进机械性能的脂肪族可降解离聚体的新方法。它们还可以带来一些特定的优势，比如将生物降解性引入不可生物降解的材料中，并可以改善聚合物（如PMMA）的热稳定性和冲击行为，PMMA是一种脆性材料，通过解压缩机制降解。从使用后可降解性的角度来看，新材料也可能令人感兴趣。

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.