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Segmental Mobility Studies of Poly( N ‐isopropyl acrylamide) Interactions with Gold Nanoparticles and Its Use as a Thermally Driven Trapping System
Author(s) -
Swift Thomas,
Rehman Kiran,
Surtees Alexander,
Hoskins Richard,
Hickey Stephen G.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
macromolecular rapid communications
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.348
H-Index - 154
eISSN - 1521-3927
pISSN - 1022-1336
DOI - 10.1002/marc.201800090
Subject(s) - nanoparticle , materials science , nanomaterials , poly(n isopropylacrylamide) , colloidal gold , acrylamide , trapping , covalent bond , chemical engineering , polymer , isopropyl , metal , nanotechnology , polymer chemistry , chemistry , organic chemistry , copolymer , composite material , ecology , metallurgy , engineering , biology
Abstract Thermal desolvation of poly( N ‐isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) in the presence of a low concentration of gold nanoparticles incorporates the nanoparticles resulting in suspended aggregates. By covalently incorporating <1% acenaphthylene into the polymerization feed this copolymer is enabled to be used as a model to study the segmental mobility of the PNIPAM backbone in response to gold nanoparticles both below and above the desolvation temperature, showing that there is a physical conformational rearrangement of the soluble polymer at ultralow nanoparticle loadings, indicating low affinity interactions with the nanoparticles. Thermal desolvation is capable of extracting >99.9% of the nanoparticles from their solutions and hence demonstrates that poly( N ‐isopropylacrylamide) can act as an excellent scrubbing system to remove metallic nanomaterial pollutants from solution.