Saccharide monomers water-treatment polymers

New Saccharide-Derived Monomers and Their Use in Water-Treatment Polymers... 

Saccharides have a number of attributes that make them very attractive as raw materials for the synthesis of polymers. The confluence in saccharides of different functionalities such as multiple hydroxyl groups and latent reactivity, which is difficult to realize in wholly synthetic materials, is of particular interest to us. The preparation of monomers derived from saccharides and the subsequent polymerization of these materials is one approach that has been extensively pursued as a means to introduce saccharide groups into synthetic polymers (1-9). With a few exceptions (2), most of this previously reported work has involved attaching a polymerizable moiety onto a mono- or disaccharide. The practical synthesis of a new family of monomers derived from carbohydrates ranging from monosaccharides to large oligosaccharides and the use of these monomers to produce a detectable water treatment polymer are described in this paper. 

Low molecular weight poly(acrylic acid) is difficult if not impossible to detect directly in aqueous solution at the concentrations at which it is employed in water treatment applications. There are, however, many classic colorimetric techniques for the quantitative detection of saccharides down to the ppm level (75). If a poly(acrylic acid) water treatment polymer is prepared with pendent saccharide functionality, detecting the polymer reduces to a problem of detecting the saccharide functionality. With monomers of the type 5 in hand, we were able to explore this strategy for the preparation of a detectable water treatment polymer. 

A very practical and broadly applicable two-step synthesis of a new family of monofunctional saccharide monomers was developed (16). In this synthesis, all reactions are done in water, no protecting groups are employed, and no by-products are formed. These saccharide-derived monomers were found to be useful as tags for water treatment polymers (7 7). 

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