Enhancing the sustainability of thermosetting plastics by incorporating them into a circular economy faces many scientific, economic, and policy obstacles. The primary scientific obstacle is that the strong covalent crosslinks that give thermosets their outstanding thermal and mechanical properties cannot be reformed when the material is damaged or ground, preventing repair and reprocessing. Dynamic covalent crosslinks have emerged as a promising approach to provide the necessary thermal and mechanical performance under service conditions, while enabling topology reconfiguration under heating. The Kalow Lab seeks to bridge the molecular-level understanding of exchange chemistries and the macroscopic observation of flow and healing by combining physical organic studies and mechanical characterization. We find that stiffness and stress relaxation rate can be decoupled and independently modulated by synthetically tuning the cross-linker and prepolymer backbone, respectively. In this talk, I will discuss strategies to incorporate these dynamic bonds into different polymer networks, and the effect of topological defects on dynamic networks.

Molecular engineering in four dimensions: A mechanistic approach to reprocessable polymer networks

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.