Soft Materials Structures and Devices
Thursday, September 21st, 2017, 5:00 pm, Room 3-333
Metal-coordinate complexes: A versatile tool when engineering soft material mechanics via supra-molecular crosslink dynamics
Professor Niels Holten-Andersen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Growing evidence supports a critical role of metal-coordination complex crosslinking in soft biological material properties such as underwater adhesion and self-healing. Given their exploitation in such desirable material applications in nature, bio-inspired metal-coordinate complex crosslinking provides unique opportunities to further advance synthetic polymer materials engineering. Using bio-inspired metal-binding polymers, initial efforts to mimic these material properties have shown some promise. In addition, new fundamental insights, on how polymer network mechanics can be strongly coupled to supramolecular crosslink dynamics, are emerging. Early lessons from studies of these supramolecular chemo-mechanical couplings will be presented.