A new approach to the synthesis of monomers and polymers incorporating furan/maleimide Diels-Alder adducts

The Diels-Alder reaction between furan and maleimide moieties is a well-known and widely used strategy to build bio-based macromolecular structures with peculiar properties. The furan-maleimide adducts are thermally reversible because they can be broken above about 120°C and recombined at lower temperatures. At the moment only the monomers exhibiting the furan or the maleimide moieties on their extremity are used in order to get linear or cross-linked polymeric structures. The innovative idea described here consists in using a monomer bearing two carboxylic acidic groups on its extremities and a furan-maleimide Diels-Alder adduct within its structure. This monomer can give rise to classical polycondensation reactions leading to polymers. These polymers (which are polyesters in the present case) can be broken at high temperatures in correspondence of the furane-maleimide Diels-Alder adduct leading to segments exhibiting furan or maleimide moieties at their extremities, which at lower temperature recombine leading to random or block copolymers.