Polylactic acid (PLA) has found widespread use in plastics and in biomedical applications due to its biodegradability into natural benign products. However, PLA-based materials remain limited in usefulness due to difficulty of incorporating functional groups into the polymer backbone. In this paper, we report a strategy for PLA functionalization that establishes the preparation of highly deriva...

The modification of polymers has received much attention recently. Among the methods of modification of polymers, grafting is one of the promising methods. In principle, graft co-polymerization is an attractive method to impart a variety of functional groups to a polymer. Graft co-polymerization initiated by chemical treatment, photo-irradiation, high-energy radiation technique, etc. is documen...

Polymeric materials as anion exchange membranes (AEMs) play an essential role in the field of energy and environment. The achievement of high performance AEMs by the precise manipulation of macromolecular architecture remains a daunting challenge. Herein, we firstly report a novel rod-coil graft copolymer AEM, possessing rigid hydrophobic main chains and soft hydrophilic graft chains. The low g...

Reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer polymerization (RAFT) was used to prepare polymer brushes grafted onto silica nanoparticles. Novel RAFT-silane agents were prepared that contained both an active RAFT moiety and a silane coupling agent. RAFT agents were anchored to silica nanoparticles by the functionalization of colloidal silica with the RAFT-silane agents. RAFT polymerizations ...