Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 32: Poster Session II

CPP 32.1: Poster

Tuesday, March 13, 2018, 14:00–16:00, Poster B

Structural investigations of multi-responsive physical hydrogels — •Florian Jung¹, Panayiota A. Panteli², Constantinos Tsitsilianis³, Costas S. Patrickios², and Christine M. Papadakis¹ — ¹Technical University of Munich, Physics Department, Garching, Germany — ²University of Cyprus, Department of Chemistry, Nicosia, Cyprus — ³University of Patras, Department of Chemical Engineering, Patras, Greece

Stimuli-responsive physical hydrogels strongly change their properties upon a small change of the environment and may be used as fast sensors or for drug delivery.

In the present work, we investigate the structure of a multiresponsive, CBABC type pentablock terpolymer. The end blocks are statistical copolymers of the hydrophobic n-BuMA and the thermoresponsive TEGMA, the intermediate middle blocks are the weak cationic polyelectrolyte PDMAEMA, and the middle block is the hydrophilic PEG. In aqueous solution, either flower-like micelles or a physical network, with the hydrophobic end blocks acting as crosslinks, are expected. The dynamics of the network may be tuned by varying the temperature around the cloudpoint. pH allows stretching of the intermediate blocks and thus tunes the gelation behavior. Concentration-, pH- and temperature-dependent structural information was obtained from dynamic light scattering (DLS) and small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) investigations. The results show that there is an interplay between different responses in these multiresponsive systems.