Be Strong, Tough, Adaptive and Self-healing: Life Lessons Applied to Soft Material Designs

Time: Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - 10:30am - 11:30am
Type: Seminar Series
Presenter: Zhibin Guan; Department of Chemistry, University of California - Irvine
Room/Office: Becton 035
Location:
Becton Seminar Room
15 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
United States

Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering Seminar Series

Professor Zhibin Guan
Department of Chemistry
University of California - Irvine

"Be Strong, Tough, Adaptive and Self-healing: Life Lessons Applied to Soft Material Designs"

Many biopolymers not only have advanced mechanical properties such as high modulus, toughness, and elasticity, but more importantly, exhibit dynamic properties. Inspired by Nature, we have designed a series of biomimetic modular polymers with folded nano-domains as the repeat units. These new material manifest an exciting combination of key mechanical, as well as adaptive, properties that have until now proven difficult to achieve in man-made systems. Single molecule force was used to correlate the exceptional mechanical properties with their molecular structures. In another example of material design inspired by nature, we developed strong and spontaneous self-healing polymers. In contrast to previous designs, our system spontaneously self-heals as a single-component solid at ambient conditions without the need of any external stimulus, healing agent, plasticizer, or solvent. In addition, we developed several other strategies for self-healing materials including the use of dynamic metalligand interactions and dynamic covalent bond exchange. In this seminar, I will discuss the design, synthesis, and single molecule and macroscopic property studies of several dynamic adaptive polymers, as well as strong and autonomic self-healing systems.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017 
10:30AM 
Becton Seminar Rm MC 035 
Refreshments at 10:AM 

Host: Mingjiang Zhong

 

References:

1. "Modular Design in Natural and Biomimetic Soft Materials" Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 9026.
2. "Multiphase Design of Stiff and Autonomic Self-Healing Poly-mers" Nature Chem. 2012, 4, 467.
3. "Direct correlation of single-molecule properties with bulk mechanical performance for the biomimetic design of polymers" Nature Materials 2014, 13, 1055.
4. "Self-Healing Multiphase Polymers via Dynamic Metal-Ligand Inter-actions" J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2014, 136, 16128.
5. "Malleable and Self-Healing Covalent Polymer Networks through Tunable Dynamic Boronic Ester Bonds" J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, 137, 6492.