Despite the tremendous efforts devoted to the structural analysis of hydrogel microspheres (microgels), many details of their structures remain unclear. Reported in this study is that thermoresponsive poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) (pNIPAm)-based microgels exhibit not only the widely accepted core-shell structures, but also inhomogeneous decanano-sized non-thermoresponsive spherical domains within their dense cores, which was revealed by temperature-controlled high-speed atomic force microscopy (TC-HS-AFM). Based on a series of experiments, it is concluded that the non-thermoresponsive domains are characteristic for pNIPAm microgels synthesized by precipitation polymerization, and plausible structures for microgels prepared by other polymerization techniques are proposed.
Keywords: atomic force microscopy; hydrogels; microgels; polymerization; structure elucidation.
© 2019 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.