Smart thermo-responsive nanoparticles

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2010

Abstract

Stimuli-responsive polymers, also called smart materials or intellectual materials, show an interesting property change behavior to external stimulus. These external stimuli, including pH [1,2], temperature [3-6], light [7,8], magnetic and electric field [9,10], and solvent/salt [11,12], result in a change of the polymers in conformation, solubility, and hydrophilic/hydrophobic balance. The property change of the polymer to external environmental condition change can be linear or nonlinear. The nonlinear change attracts more scientific interest since a small stimulus change may result in a large response. Based on their response to different stimuli, stimuli-responsive polymers can be classified into several categories: thermo-responsive polymer, pH-responsive polymer, magnetic-responsive polymer, and double-/multiresponsive polymer due to their response to a combination of two or more stimuli. Furthermore, based on different structures of stimuli-responsive polymers, there are linear polymers, cross-linked polymers (hydrogel), micelles, core-shell particles, and polymer-protein conjugates. Stimuli-responsive polymers have shown applications in many fields, such as drug encapsulation and delivery [13-17], diagnostics [18], sensing [19,20], fabrication of photonic crystals [21,22], nanoparticle templates [23,24], and separation and purification technologies [25,26]. Among the stimuli-responsive polymers, thermo-responsive polymers are one of the most widely studied polymers because of their temperature-sensitive properties [27,28].

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Advanced Polymer Nanoparticles: Synthesis and Surface Modifications

First Page

197

Last Page

221

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