Fabricating Water-Insoluble Polyelectrolyte into Multilayers with Layer-by-layer Self-assembly

A water insoluble azo-containing polyelectrolyte (PEAPB6P-AC) was successfully fabricated into multilayer films based on the layer-by-layer adsorption technique by using N, N-dimethylformamide (DMF) as the assembling media. The multilayer growth and structure were studied with UV-vis spectroscopy, and the multilayer surface were imaged with Atomic Force Microscopy and compared with that fabricated in water. The results show that assembling PEAPB6P-AC in DMF can effectively eliminate the hydrophobic aggregation of the azo units and consequently results in a much smoother multilayer surface than that fabricated in water. This improvement to the layer-by-layer adsorption technique, which can avoid some major difficulties faced when assembling hydrophobic polyelectrolytes in aqueous solutions, seems to be a versatile way to fabricate high quality multilayer films when using the hydrophobic even water-insoluble polyelectrolytes as assembling units.