Abstract
This paper presents the synthesis of polyspiroketal bearing reactive pendants and its crosslinking reaction based on radical thiol-ene reaction. For synthesizing the polyspiroketal, a tetraol bearing two allyl ether moieties was prepared from myo-inositol, a naturally occurring cyclic hexaol, and was condensed with 1,4-cyclohexanedione with the aid of azeotropic removal of the formed water. The resulting polyspiroketal was endowed with allyl pendants, which was readily functionalized by thiol-ene reaction using monothiols. The high efficiency of the functionalization allowed successful crosslinking reaction of the polyspiroketal using dithiols to yield the corresponding networked polymers.
