Synthesis of hydrogels with well defined network structure using Click chemistry

POLY 552

Robert Vestberg, robertv@mrl.ucsb.edu, Michael Malkoch, Nalini Gupta, ngupta@engineering.ucsb.edu, and Craig J. Hawker, hawker@mrl.ucsb.edu. Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Well defined hydrogels based on poly ethylene glycol crosslinked using the highly efficient copper catalyzed Click chemistry between terminal acetylenes and organic azides. Different molecular weight PEG's were used to study the effect on the properties of the hydrogels. UV-crosslinked gels based on diacrylate functional PEGs were also constructed for comparison. All the gels had a water content around 90 % in there fully swollen state. The uniaxial tensile testing showed that the strain and stress at break increased with increasing length of the PEG chain elucidating that the properties of the gel could be tuned. It also showed that the hydrogels formed by Click chemistry had much better mechanical properties than their UV cured derivatives.
 

7th International Biorelated Polymers Symposium
8:30 AM-12:40 PM, Wednesday, 13 September 2006 San Francisco Marriott -- Salon 14/15, Oral

Division of Polymer Chemistry

The 232nd ACS National Meeting, San Francisco, CA, September 10-14, 2006