Silicones or polysiloxanes are widely produced by anionic ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of cyclic trimers such as hexamethylcyclotrisiloxane (D3) to obtain poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS). In order to widely exploit the unique properties of polysiloxanes, PDMS is often incorporated into block copolymer structures with a variety of different comonomers especially with hydrophilic poly(ether)s, like poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) attached to the PDMS as linear copolymers or grafted onto the PDMS backbone. Given the promising role of silicone-based amphiphilic block copolymers in a whole set of applications, we present here a novel approach consisting of few synthetic steps for the preparation of end-functionalised amphiphilic PDMS-PEO block copolymers (scheme 1). In addition to, we report on the synthesis of heterobifunctional PEO polymers of structure X-PEO-Y and particularly on the analysis of the polymers using Interaction Chromatography (IC) and Size Exclusion Chromatography (SEC) techniques1. The most direct method to obtain heterobifunctional PEO is the AROP of EO from a functional anionic initiator (X), followed by termination with a different functional group (Y) (scheme 2). The characterization of PEO and derivatives using HPLC techniques, including normal-phase (NP) and reversed-phase (RP) liquid chromatography have been generally used to separate the oligomers basing on the molecular weights2. Our main goal is to develop conditions for the Normal Phase Isothermal Interaction Chromatography (NP-IIC) analysis of end-functionalised PEO and to establish whether IC can provide additional information to SEC analysis about the molecular structure of PEO. It is known that NP-IC can be very useful for its ability to separate polymers in terms of functional groups, but we believe this is the first work showing how to discriminate PEO polymers based on their chain-end functionalities by using NP-IIC as evidenced in figure 2. 1. Chang T.Y., Lee H.C., Lee W., Park S. and Ko C.H., Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics, 1999, 200, 2188-2204 2. Chang T., Journal of Polymer Science Part B-Polymer Physics, 2005, 43, 1591-1607

New synthetic strategy for the synthesis of amphiphilic PDMS-PEO block copolymer and characterization of heterobifunctional PEO using normal phase-interaction chromatography

251st National Meeting (2016)

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