Associative behaviour of novel polymeric graft copolymers in aqueous solution

Amphiphilic graft copolymers (AGCs) have been studied for their complex and fascinating chemical properties. Potential applications have been identified as wetting agents, foaming agents, drug carriers as well as additives for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR).The AGCs of interest are shown in Figure 1: the preliminary Small-angle neutron scattering (Figure 2) has been used to characterize the conformation these graft copolymers adopt in selective solvents (e.g. Water) with possible formation of a core-shell structure. Analyses of tensiometric data (Figure 2) indicate that higher grafting numbers promote a surface tension reduction. We propose to investigate the structure of the AGC in a selective solvent for the grafted chains, as well as the effect of altering the ratio of backbone to graft chains by varying the molecular weight of the chains.