Controllable Synthesis Of Silver-Polymer Composite Microspheres With Patterned Surface Structures

Polymer microgels are a group of typical soft-solid micro-particle materials with 3D network structures. Polymer microgels have the advantages of simple synthesis and adjustable chemical functionality, and their sizes varied from nano- to microscale by choosing the appropriate polymerization technique. More importantly, microgels have distinct stimulus-responsive volume changes, and the stimuli could be temperature, pH, ionic strength, electric and magnetic fields, etc. In recent ten years, application of microgels as micro- or nanoreactors for the preparation of inorganic nanoparticles has been intensively explored. Based on the unique physical and chemical properties of polymer microgels, our group proposed a novel route for preparing inorganic-polymer composite microspheres with patterned surface structures by a polymer microgel template. Actually, the network structure and the spherical morphology of microgels might control and direct the crystal and precipitation of inorganics, and thereby controlling the final sizes and surface morphologies of the composites. In reverse, inorganic precipitation reaction may induce the transformation of the network structures of the microgel. It is expected that the new template method integrating with various factors may potentially become an important synthesis technique to prepare composite microspheres with novel structures and special properties. By employing this technique, various fancy composite microspheres have been synthesized in our laboratory, such as metal sulfide-polymer composite microspheres (CuS-PNIPAM, CdS-P(NIPAM-co-MAA), CuS-P(NIPAM-co-AA), CuS-P(NIPAM-co-MAA), Ag₂S-P(NIPAM-co-MAA), ZnS-P(NIPAM-co-MAA)), oxides-polymer composite microspheres((SiO₂-P(NIPAM-co-AA)), and inorganic insoluble salt-polymer composite microspheres (AgCl-PAM, BaSO₄-PAM). Based upon previous studies, the application of the polymeric microgel template method was extended for the preparation of metal-polymer composite microspheres. In this study, we focus our research interest on the controllable synthesis of silver-polymer composite microspheres with patterned surface structures. The thesis includes two parts as follows:(1) Acrylamide (AM) and methacrylic acid (MAA) copolymer microgels were...