Research Projects

Polymeric materials play an important role in, and have fundamentally reshaped every aspect of, modern living. Due to the high durability and versatility along with low cost the annual worldwide production of plastic exceeding 335 million tons. However, the ever-growing production, coupled with negligible degradability, of the finite petroleum-based synthetic polymeric materials has raised overarching economic and environmental challenges. Nowadays, plastic waste is found all over the globe, from the ocean depths to peaks of the Mount Everest. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop alternative polymeric materials that intended to undergo programmed (bio)degradation. Radical ring-opening polymerization (rROP) is an emerging technique to synthesize (bio)degradable polymers from vinyl-based materials via copolymerization of specifically designed monomers with conventional monomer feedstock. rROP allows facile incorporation of heteroatoms/functional groups into the polymer backbone. Fortuitously discovered in 2019, a new class of thionoester group containing rROP monomer have recently emerged as good candidates to prepare degradable polymers. The polymerization of such cyclic thionolactone monomers leads to the insertion of thioester linkages into a polymer backbone. The introduction of thioester groups is advantageous when compared to their (oxo)ester counterpart as thioesters can be easily degraded by additional mechanisms including hydrolysis, trans thioesterification, aminolysis and oxidative hydrolysis. Till date, only a few number of thionolactone monomers have been studied to produce degradable polymers by rROP. The rROP of thionolactone monomers is a developing are of research. We embark to explore this approach via careful design of novel cyclic thionoester monomers (benzo-fused, and heterocycles with one or more hetero atom) and to investigate their capability to produce the (bio)degradable polymers by the radical ring-opening copolymerization of specifically designed monomers with conventional vinyl monomer feedstock. Using the rROP approach, our prime goal is to incorporate degradable thioester linkages in the polymer backbone by choosing an appropriate ratio of the specially designed cyclic thionoester monomer and commercial monomer provided that the incorporation of a small number (5-10%) of degradable units in the conventional vinyl polymers does not significantly alter the actual properties of the polymer as a whole. The synthesized polymers will be evaluated to be used for PISA, waste-water treatment, electrospinning and 3D printing. The successful outcome this proposal and the applicant’s expertise in this field will establish new grounds of research in India for the development of a new class of degradable polymers. Furthermore, the expected results of the current proposal will not only contribute to encounter the problem of plastic pollution but also lead a path for the development of the next-generation plastics.