pH-Induced structure change of poly(vinyl alcohol) hydrogel crosslinked with poly(acrylic acid)

The structure of the hydrogel of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) was investigated by small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) of synchrotron radiation. A physically crosslinked blend gel, which was prepared by repetitive freezing and thawing of an aqueous solution of PVA and PAA, could be chemically crosslinked by esterification of PVA with PAA even in the hydrogel state. The chemical crosslinking induced the destruction of physical crosslinks into a folded structure, indicating that the chemical crosslinking proceeds at the sites around the physical crosslinks that contain PVA and PAA in much higher concentration than other portion of the gel, The pH-induced structure changes of the PVA hydrogels, chemically crosslinked with poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) were investigated by SAXS on the samples of various chemical crosslinking time. The gels were shrunk at pH4, and swollen at pH8. The results of SAXS showed, that the Pored slope changed with chemical crosslinking time from -3.5 to -2.9 at pH4, and from -2.9 to -2.4 at pH8. The results suggest that a folded structure as a structural domain, which is characterized by fractally rough interface, tends to change into the structure that corresponds to percolation cluster, particularly at pH8. The gels immersed in pH8 showed a remarkable structure change accompanying swelling. The results revealed that a conformational change of PAA chains, induced by the pH change, can be explained by the presence of a structural domain in the gel network, where both PVA chains and PAA chains get entangled and partially form a interpenetrating polymer network(IPN).