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Published on: August 2, 2012
Activation energy of aggregation-disaggregation self-oscillation of polymer chain
1Nanosystem Research Institute, NRI, National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, AIST, Central 5-2, 1-1-1 Higashi, Tsukuba 305-8565, Japan. y-hara@aist.go.jp
Abstract:
In this paper, we investigated the activation energies of the aggregation−disaggregation self-oscillation induced by the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction by utilizing the nonthermoresponsive polymer chain in a wide temperature range. This is because the conventional type self-oscillating polymer chain, with thermoresponsive poly(Nisopropylacrylamide) (poly(NIPAAm) main-chain covalently bonded to the ruthenium catalyst (Ru(bpy)(3)) of the BZ reaction, cannot evaluate the activation energy over the lower critical solution temperature (LCST). The nonthermoresponsive self-oscillating polymer chain is composed of a poly-vinylpyrrolidone (PVP) main-chain with the ruthenium catalyst (Ru(bpy)(3)). As a result, we clarified that the activation energy of the aggregation−disaggregation self-oscillation of the polymer chain is hardly affected by the concentrations of the BZ substrates. In addition, the activation energy of the nonthermoresponsive self-oscillating polymer chain was found to be almost the same value as normal BZ reaction, i.e., not including the self-oscillating polymer system with Ru moiety.
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