Synthesis and Performance of Polycarboxylate Ether Superplasticizers with Controlled Structure via RAFT Polymerization
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 36, Issue 8
Abstract
Comblike polycarboxylate superplasticizers (PCs) have been widely used as construction and building materials by means of high fluidity and fine dispersibility via electrostatic repulsion and steric hindrance. The conventional PCs are usually synthesized by free radical polymerization, which limit to understand and even distort the structure-property relationship due to the random molecular structure and the broad polydispersity. In this work, polycarboxylate ether superplasticizers of acrylic acid (AA) and ethylene glycol monovinyl PEG (EPEG) with controlled structure were prepared by reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization. The resultant copolymers (denoted as EPCs) were characterized by FT-IR, 1H NMR and GPC spectroscopy. The effect of actual acid/ether (AA/EPEG) ratio on the adsorption capacity and dispersion ability of EPCs in cement paste were deeply investigated. These results demonstrate that the dispersibility of EPCs with controlled molecular weights and comparatively narrow polydispersity indexes () strongly depends on the acid/ether ratio. With an increase of the feed molar ratio of AA/EPEG from to , the molecular weight and their distribution of EPCs increases accordingly. In addition, the adsorption capacity and dispersion property of EPCs to cement are densely related to the molecular structure and composition and superior to that of conventional PC analogues. A possible mechanism was proposed that EPCs can act uniformly on the surface of cement particles due to the well-defined molecular structure and well-distributed molecular weight, which is different from the conventional PCs, which will offer the fundamentals of design and synthesis for polycarboxylate superplasticizers with controlled structures.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The support of Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.: ZR2022ME135) was gratefully acknowledged.
Author contribution: Xiaodong Chen: Data curation, Writing-Original draft preparation. Xinde Tang: Supervision, Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing-Reviewing and Editing. Cuizhen Zhang: Investigation, Experiment. Haichao Guo: Experiment, Investigation. Xuefan Li: Investigation. Fei Ma: Experiment, Investigation. Xinyan Wang: Investigation. Yanan Chao: Investigation. Laixue Pang: Investigation, Methodology. Yong Yang: Investigation, Data curation. Fuying Dong: Conceptualization, Writing-Reviewing and Editing.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 36 • Issue 8 • August 2024
Copyright
© 2024 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 5, 2023
Accepted: Jan 23, 2024
Published online: May 22, 2024
Published in print: Aug 1, 2024
Discussion open until: Oct 22, 2024
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