Photo-induced curing of thymine-based bioinspired polymers. A chemometric analysis

Abstract

The curing process of new materials based on styrene monomers functionalized with thymine and charged ionic groups was studied using UV-vis spectroscopy in combination with chemomet-ric models. The effect of the copolymer molecular weight on the immobilization point was analyzed. The evolution of the curing process of the copolymer (4-vinylbenzyl) thymine (VBT) -vinylbenzyl triethyl ammonium chloride (VBA) involved three species, which absorb in the spectral region analyzed. The contributions of each species to the total signal at each irradiation time were determined, and the ki-netic constant of the crosslinking reaction was esti-mated. The study allowed evaluating the consistency of the chemometric decomposition, obtaining a rea-sonable correlation between the frequency spectra and the time evolution calculated with the algorithm. The chemometric analysis showed to be a powerful tool to provide complementary information on photo-induced immobilization of VBT-VBA films, which is crucial for developing new environmentally benign materials and new energy-saving methods.