Inverse vulcanization, a sustainable platform, can transform sulfur, an industrial by-product, into polymers with broad promising applications such as heavy metal capture, electrochemistry and antimicrobials. However, the process usually requires high temperatures (≥159 °C), and the crosslinkers needed to stabilize the sulfur are therefore limited to high-boiling-point monomers only. Here, we report an alternative route for inverse vulcanization—mechanochemical synthesis, with advantages of mild conditions (room temperature), short reaction time (3 h), high atom economy, less H2S, and broader monomer range. Successful generation of polymers using crosslinkers ranging from aromatic, aliphatic to volatile, including renewable monomers, demonstrates this method is powerful and versatile. Compared with thermal synthesis, the mechanochemically synthesized products show enhanced mercury capture. The resulting polymers show thermal and light induced recycling. The speed, ease, versatility, safety, and green nature of this process offers a more potential future for inverse vulcanization, and enables further unexpected discoveries.

Inverse vulcanization allows polymeric materials to be formed from excess elemental sulfur, promoting polysulfide chains to be stabilized between organic comonomers, rather than reforming as crystalline S 8 , resulting in high sulfur content materials with interesting properties. The techniques used to determine if free unreacted sulfur remains in the polymers only detect the crystalline and not the amorphous form. A detailed study is presented on the quantification of free amorphous sulfur within inverse vulcanized polymers, in which free sulfur is shown to increase over a period of aging. Postaging regeneration by stimulating homolytic S−S cleavage in the polymer is investigated.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract