Kinetics of Polymer Desorption from Colloids Probed by Aggregation-Induced Emission Fluorophore

Polymer adsorption and desorption are fundamental in many industrial and biomedical applications. Here, we introduce a new method to monitor the polymer desorption kinetics in situ based on the behavior of aggregation-induced emission. Poly(ethylene oxide) and colloidal silica (SiO2) were used as a model system. It was found that the aggregation-induced emission method could be successfully used to determine the polymer desorption kinetics, and the polymer desorption followed the first-order kinetics. It was also found that the polymer desorption rate constant decreased with the increasing molecular weight, which could be described by a power law function kd ≈ M–0.28, close to that of the adsorption rate constant.