広島大学大学院工学研究科高分子工学研究室

Japanese

A polymer gel is a cross-linked three dimentional polymer networks that contains liquids in its internal space. It is a soft matter intermediate between a solid and a liquid. The gel shows discontinuous volume change when a external stimuli such as temperature, light and electric field, is imposed upon it. It is called a stimuli responsiveness.
The polymer gel swells or shrinks when external condition such as ion strength or solvent composition is changed. It is called a phase transition. The phase transition in gels caused by four fundamental interactions, i.e. hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic interaction, van der Waals interaction and ionic interaction between ionized groups.
There are many potential applications of the polymer gels such as the separation of solutes or metal ions, immobilization of enzymes and drug delivery system. New application also has been developed, in which gel networks are used as a reaction, separation and/or chemo-mechanical energy transformation media, for example, adsorbents, membranes, chromatography and preparation of fine particles in the gel networks.

It is very important to control the internal constitution of the polymer, when developing the various functional materials. When poly- acrylic acid is esterified, its property changes largely from hydrophilic to hydrophobic. In this research, we investigate the synthesis and the application of the new amphiphilic core shell type gel (gel capsule) which consists of the core of unreacted poly-acrylic acid gel and the outside shell layer of the hydrophobic poly acrylic ester gel by selective reaction from the surface.

Hiroshima University, Graduate School of Engineering

Polymer Technology Lab.

Nakai・ Gotoh Lab.