A Cost-Effective, Column-Free Route to Ethylene Glycol Oligomers EG₆, EG₁₀, and EG₁₂

Abstract

Although monodisperse ethylene glycol (EG) oligomers are important in a wide range of applications (ranging from drug therapeutics to materials science and engineering), their cost - especially for longer EG oligomers is often prohibitive. For example, decaethylene, EG₁₀, and dodecaethylene, EG₁₂, glycols cost hundreds of dollars per gram, and are only available from most vendors, including Sigma-Aldrich, in the polydispersed form. This high-cost is, in large part, due to laborious nature of synthesis and, above all, purification steps involved. Therefore, the motivation of our work was to design a cost-effective route to the EG oligomers that would altogether avoid the column-chromatography purification. This was achieved by a simple synthetic strategy, which combines bidirectional growth of the EG chains with the protection scheme using easy-to-remove trityl groups.

ethylene glycol oligomer - monodisperse - column-free - EG oligomer - PEGs - cost-effective

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