Polymers from functional clusters

01.01.2007 - 31.05.2010
Research funding project
An emerging sub-class of inorganic-organic hybrid materials is polymers which are crosslinked by inorganic clusters. To prepare such materials, clusters with functional organic ligands are polymerized with organic co-monomers. In previous work we were using carboxylate-substituted titanium and zirconium oxo clusters for the crosslinking of polymers, i.e. clusters having no inherent physical properties. The clusters influence the properties of the resulting hybrid materials by a combination of nanofiller and crosslinking effects. In the proposed project, we want to add a third dimension to the properties by extending this work towards clusters which additionally provide special magnetic or optical properties to the hybrid polymers due to their inherent physical properties. The resulting materials will thus combine the properties of organic polymers, such as processibility, elasticity etc. with that of the inorganic nanobuilding blocks. The first part of the project therefore consists of preparing functional clusters with functional (polymerizable) ligands. We will concentrate on three classes of clusters, viz. iron clusters representing magnetic clusters, zinc and cadmium sulfide clusters which may supplement interesting optical properties to the hybrid materials, and the largely unexplored lanthanoid clusters, which have special optical and/or magnetic properties. We mainly want to modify known cluster types in a way that functional ligands are introduced. This will be done by several methods and for several types of ligands. The use of new ligand types allows introducing new functional organic groups to the cluster surface and thus polymerization methods which were not applicable with the carboxylate-substituted clusters. The hybrid polymers will be prepared by polymerizing mixtures of the appropriately substituted functional clusters and organic co-monomers. We will mainly employ radical polymerizations, but also step-polymerizations, i.e. to obtain polyester or polyamide-based hybrid polymers. Major issues for the characterization of the polymers are the distribution of the clusters, properties due to the filler and crosslinker effect, such as swelling behavior, thermal stability or mechanical properties, as well the properties introduced by the clusters, i.e. magnetic or optical properties. The use of functional clusters for the preparation of hybrid polymers thus has several interwoven aspects that provide a special challenge compared with our previous work: to employ new cluster types as nanosized building blocks, the use of other types of ligands to introduce polymerizable surface groups, the influence of the functional/functionalized clusters on the polymerization reactions and new polymerization options.

People

Project leader

Project personnel

Institute

Grant funds

  • FWF - Österr. Wissenschaftsfonds (National) Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

Research focus

  • Non-metallic Materials: 80%
  • Composite Materials: 10%
  • Materials Characterization: 10%

Keywords

GermanEnglish
Clusterclusters
PolymerePolymers
Hybridmaterialienhybrid materials
MagnetismusMagnetism
LuminiszenzLuminescence

Publications