Difunctional ligands assist a facile scalable strategy for the synthesis of spherical polymer brushes

Polymer brushes are special structures that can be described as polymer chains tethered to another polymer chain or to the surface of planar, cylindrical, or spherical matrix. Tremendous potential applications of polymer brushes have been explored such as in drug delivery, antifouling coating, and enhance oil recovery (EOR). Herein, combining the “grafting to” and “grafting from” techniques, we present a facile and scalable method to obtain spherical polymer brushes utilizing a rational designed difunctional ligand. The difunctional ligand allows for the generation of polymer colloidal core along with the growth of polymer chains in situ at the surface simultaneously. By this strategy, a well-defined spherical polymer brushes with core–shell morphology were formed in a high yield (95%). Benefiting from the difunctional ligand, the usage of emulsifier for emulsion polymerization was adequately reduced. Furthermore, the obtained polymer brushes exhibit excellent surface and interfacial activity. Oil–water interfacial tension reduced approximately 9 mN/m at extremely low concentration (1.0 ppm). Meanwhile, the obtained polymer brushes can stabilize O/W emulsion more effectively than the unmodified counterparts. Additionally, the swelling behavior of the well-defined polymer brushes could be well controlled by cross-link degree. This strategy will provide a new avenue for scalable synthesis of polymer brush–based functional materials for industrial applications.