(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-05-03)
Tennyson, Simone Lena
Thionolactones are a recently discovered sub-class of radical ring-opening monomers that are notable for their ability to impart labile thioester units into polymer backbones when used as a comonomer. The simple scaffold allows for structural changes to further tune the monomer’s reactivity in order to change rates of copolymerization with different monomer families and can even lead to systems capable of homopolymerization. Thionolactones also demonstrate high degrees of control with reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerizations, and rapid reactivity with acrylates. In this thesis, the introduction of the furan heterocycle into a 7-membered thionolactone monomer scaffold is described, and the resulting homopolymerization behavior is studied (Chapter 2). Additionally, a thermally responsive amphiphilic diblock polymer of N,N-dimethylacrylamide and N-isopropylacrylamide with a cleavable thioester junction is prepared using a new 6-membered thionolactone derivative with ultra-fast copolymerization behavior (Chapter 3).