Swelling of ionic and non-ionic minigels

In this paper, non-ionic poly-N-isopropylacrylamide (PNIPAM) minigels and ionic imidazolium based minigels are synthesized to study the swelling after the addition of solvent. The kinetics of swelling is described using Tanakaʹs model and the diffusion coefficients are calculated. They are of the same order of magnitude of those reported for macro- and microgels and far from that of water self-diffusion. The presence of charge for ionic minigels allows swelling control through the ions present in the surrounding solvent.