Highly Oxygen-Tolerant and Self-Adaptive Surface-Initiated Bimetal-Mediated Controlled Radical Polymerization

We report herein a self-adaptive surface-initiated bimetal-mediated controlled radical polymerization (SI-BMCRP) for fabricating various polymer brushes using microliter volumes under ambient conditions. The introduction of bimetal CuZn alloy can self-adaptively control the dissociation of copper species while still realizing the controllability of polymer brush growth with high oxygen tolerance at a wide range of distances between the bimetal alloy and the initiator-modified substrate. The successful fabrication of multiscale and multifunctional polymer brushes with high-end group fidelity and patterned architectures further demonstrates the robust nature of SI-BMCRP. The resultant polymer brushes show great potential for new applications in moisture-enabled electricity generation, breath monitoring, and speech recognition.