Moderated ionic bonding for water-free recyclable polyelectrolyte complex materials.

ABSTRACT: While nature extensively uses electrostatic bonding between oppositely charged polymers to assemble and stabilize materials, harnessing these interactions in synthetic systems has been challenging. Synthetic materials cross-linked with a high density of ionic bonds, such as polyelectrolyte complexes, only function properly when their charge interactions are attenuated in the presence of ample amounts of water; dehydrating these materials creates such strong Coulombic bonding that they become brittle, non-thermoplastic, and virtually impossible to process. We present a strategy to intrinsically moderate the electrostatic bond strengths in apolar polymeric solids by the covalent grafting of attenuator spacers to the charge carrying moieties. This produces a class of polyelectrolyte materials

SUBMITTER: van Lange SGM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10780884 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature