Seawater-Boosting Surface-Initiated Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization for Functional Polymer Brush Engineering
Xiaodong Yin, Daheng Wu, Haoyong Yang, Jianing Wang, Runhao Huang, Tianyue Zheng, Qi Sun, Tao Chen, Liping Wang, Tao Zhang
Abstract
Iron-mediated surface-initiated reversible deactivation radical polymerization (Fe0 SI-RDRP) is an appealing approach to produce robust polymer surfaces with low toxicity and biocompatibility, while its application has been limited so far due to the poor activity of iron-based catalysts. Herein, we show that the iron(0)-mediated surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization (Fe0 SI-ATRP) could be significantly enhanced by simply using seawater as reaction media. In comparison, there was no polymer brush formation in deionized water. This method could convert a range of monomers to well-defined polymer brushes with unparalleled speed (up to 31.5 nm min–1) and a minor amount of monomer consumption (μL). Moreover, the resultant polymer brush shows chain-end fidelity which could be exemplified by repetitive Fe0 SI-ATRP to obtain tetrablock brushes. Finally, we show the preparation of polymer-brush-gated ion-selective membranes by Fe0 SI-ATRP for osmotic energy conversion, which gives excellent power densities of 5.93 W m–2, outperforming the most reported as well as commercialized benchmark (5 W m–2).