Polyoxazoline Silane Coupling Agents

The polymerization of 2-methyl-2-oxazoline is a clean reaction, which is not disturbed by chain transfer and termination. In this polymerization, the propagating species having the structure of an oxazolinium salt is not fragile, which is conveniently utilized for syntheses of block copolymers and end-reactive polymers [28], 

The dried polyoxazoline-modified silica gel was immersed into distilled water. The adsorption property of the resulting gel was estimated by the water content. The water uptake was calculated from an expression of (W -W)jW, where Wis the weight of dried gel and W is the weight of water-absorbed gel. The modified gel showed a higher water-adsorption property than that of untreated silica gel, which absorbed 10.8 multiples of water. The water uptake of modified gel was up to 13.7 multiples of the weight of dried gel. Thus, silica gel has been made more hydrophilic by a polyoxazoline segment. 

The obtained gels were purified by Soxhlet extraction with chloroform to remove the unreacted polyoxazoline. Table 6 summarizes the results of the preparation of polymer hybrids together with their water adsorptions. In comparison with the silica gel without polyoxazoline segments, the modified silica with 50% polyoxazoline was found to show higher water adsorption. 

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