Millions of tons of plastics end up in landfills, oceans and the environment. It is a serious environmental problem and will continue to worsen as only a small fraction of the total plastics produced are recycled. For instance, only 14% of plastic packaging is recycled each year. Thiol-ene chemistries offers a scalable and efficient platform to make UV curable thermosets. Incorporating hydrolysable acetal crosslinks into these thermosets enables full degradation into aqueous solutions with tunable degradation rates defined by acetal stability. For our materials, we synthesized a library of acetal-based monomers with varying stabilities and polymerized them with multifunctional thiols by UV photopolymerization. Mass loss vs. time was measured gravimetrically for each thermoset composition by removing degradation samples at specific time points and measuring their dry mass after lyophilization. Degradation was also monitored by time-lapse optical microscopy to observe the visual degradation differences between samples. Mechanical properties and glass transition temperatures for all materials were measured using dynamic mechanical analysis, while thermal degradation temperatures were found using thermogravimetric analysis.<br/>

Combining thiol-ene and acetal chemistries to synthesize degradable, environmentally friendly networks

2019 Spring National Meeting

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