This presentation will describe recent advances in the Schneebeli group, which enabled us to synthesize and characterize shape-defined helical ladder polymers with varying spring constants. These unique helical ladder polymers (Figure 1) act as near Hookean molecular springs (see also: Schneebeli et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2022, Just Accepted, DOI: 10.1002/anie.202209772). Unlike for more flexible polymers, the mechanism of contraction / expansion is not dominated by entropy for these shape-defined polymer backbones, which allows these systems to change their shape in a continuous yet predictable fashion under tension / compression. Dynamic nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy, and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations will be presented to illustrate the unique dynamic behavior of these helical molecular springs in the context of potential future applications related to new shock absorbing materials and the manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals.

Shape-defined polymers with unique mechanical properties

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