Entropy-Driven Thermo-gelling Vitrimer
Xiuyang Xia, P. Ramakrishna Rao, Juan Yang, Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Ran Ni
Abstract
Thermo-gelling polymers have been envisioned as promising smart biomaterials but limited by their weak mechanical and thermodynamic stabilities. Here, we propose a new thermo-gelling vitrimer, which remains at a liquid state because of the addition of protector molecules preventing the crosslinking, and with increasing temperature, an entropy-driven crosslinking occurs to induce the sol-gel transition. Moreover, we find that the activation barrier in the metathesis reaction of vitrimers plays an important role, and experimentally, one can use catalysts to tune the activation barrier to drive the vitrimer to form an equilibrium gel at high temperature, which is not subject to any thermodynamic instability. We formulate a mean-field theory to describe the entropy-driven crosslinking of the vitrimer, which agrees quantitatively with computer simulations and paves the way for the design and fabrication of novel vitrimers for biomedical applications.