Novel characteristic of dendritic polymers such as highly branched structures, large number of reactive end groups and room between the branches for taking up guest molecules create these fourth classes of polymer a suitable candidate for various applications. The only limiting factor in the widespread applications is the price of these compounds, especially dendrimers. The traditional process for creating dendrimers such as PAMAM includes an amidation step that involves thermodynamically driven, lower reaction rate, chemistry, accompanied by long reaction times. These process features require high excesses of reagent and high dilutions resulting in low production capacities per reactor and thus high costs, particularly at higher generations.
In the case of dendrimer, the Priostar families of dendrimers involves the use of faster, kinetically driven chemistry, combined with the use of polyfunctional branch cell reagents to rapidly and precisely build dendrimer structures in a controlled way, generation by generation. This present process yields precise structures with cleaner chemistry, requires lower excesses of reagents, and lower levels of dilution, thus offering a higher capacity method that is more easily scaled to commercial dimensions, and providing new ranges of materials at lower costs. With regard to the manufactured of dendritic polymers in high volumes at costs attractive, a wide variety of uses can be considered in the various field of study summarized below.
The versatile structure of dendritic structure gives to dendrimers the capability of including a wide variety of applications such as medical, health care, cosmetic, catalytic agent, molecular weight and size standards, chemical / biological sensors & detectors, polymer and plastics additives (e.g. for lowering viscosity, increasing stiffness, incorporating dyes, compatibilisers, etc.), creation of foams (i.e. synthetic zeolites or insulating material), building blocks for nanostructured materials, consumer goods, ink/laser-printing toners, dyes and paints, industrial adhesives, manufacture of nanoscale batteries and lubricants, and various healthcare/medical applications such as biomedical application, drug delivery, and biomolecular binding agents, cellular Transport, artificial cells, diagnostics and analysis, targeted delivery supermolecular assembly, catalyst, MRI contrast agents and other aspects of dendrimer applications. As mention before, dendritic polymers provide a wide variety of applications.
The applications of dendritic materials in the field of textile engineering have been concern, recently. They can be utilized as a host for entrapment of guest molecules such as dye or fragrant molecules. In addition, dendritic polymers have been used for dyeing polypropylene fiber which usually dyed in master-bach process. Froehling explained that it is possible to lock guest molecules physically within the internal cavities of a dendritic host, while the versatility of reactive end groups can be tailored to attract dyes as well as other chemical additives.
One of the most important applications of dendritic polymers would be their use as the removal of contaminant from aqueous solutions such as metal ions due to the interaction ability of their interior and functional end groups at the periphery of a dendritic structure.
The use of dendritic polymers as surface modification on the fiber, film and polymers is fairly unexplored and their application is still to be optimized; For instance, chemical modification of chitosan with cationic hyperbranched dendritic polyamidoamine on cotton fabric has been investigated to improve dye uptake as well as antimicrobial activity. Surface modifications of cotton fiber for apparel use also have been considered by dendrimer. Acrylic copolymers film has been modified via dendrigrafted with citric acid. This modification has been improved the characteristics of the fibers such as swelling/de-swelling in basic and acidic media as pH actuators, nanocarbon fiber precursors, or as active particles for loading with guest molecules.
The various applications of dendritic polymers in the field of textiles engineering.
