The talk will describe a fully oxygen photoinduced RDRP system, independent of any externally added oxygen quenchers, reducing agents or deoxygenation methods. The efficient elimination of headspace gives access to a range of monomer families, such as methyl acrylate even in molecular weights as high as ~53,000, ethylene glycol methyl ether acrylate and the hydrophilic poly(ethylene glycol methyl ether acrylate. Moreover, the hydrophobic monomers, such as n-butyl acrylate and hexyl acrylate, as well as the protected and expansively functionalised tert-butyl acrylate are polymerised in different solvents. Additionally, utilising 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol as solvent, the semi-fluorinated poly(2,2,2-trifluoroethyl acrylate) and poly(2,2,2-trifluoroethyl methacrylate) are obtained. Surprisingly, this approach is efficiently scalable from extremely low volumes, such as 5uL, to high scale reactions of 0.5L. THe experimental data generating from the oxygen probe demonstrate preliminary insights into the oxygen consumption mechanism and the role of the different components that comprise a deoxygenation-free polymerisation.
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David Haddleton has been working in the area of controlled polymer synthesis for over 25 years since being employed at ICI. His PhD “Photochemistry of some organometallic ethene compounds” was under the supervision of Robin Perutz at the University of York in 1986. He spent one year at the University of Toronto as a PDRA. He joined ICI in 1988 and spent one year at the University of Southern Mississippi working with polymer liquid crystals. Moving back to the UK in 1988 he spent 5 years working on group transfer polymerisation (GTP) and anionic polymerisation prior to moving to Warwick in 1993 and was promoted to full Professor in 1998.
He has published over 400 papers and has a google h-index = 80 with over 20000 citations. He has graduated over 70 PhD students from Warwick. Current work in the group is in different aspects of developing new polymerisation methodology and using this for novel polymers for industrial applications, polymers for personal care applications, (hair and skin care) and for biomedical and nano medicinal applications (new and targeted peptide and protein conjugation). Recent work includes new conjugation strategy, glycopolymers, monomer sequence control and polymerisation in biological media.
David was Editor in Chief of European Polymer Journal between 2002 and 2009 and Founding Editor in Chief of Polymer Chemistry 2009-2017. He is Founder of two spin off companies Warwick Effect Polymers Lrd (now part of Abzena PLC) and Medherant Ltd which is developing transdermal drug delivery products where is currently CSO.