Cleavable comonomers enable degradable, recyclable thermoset plastics.

Nature
Peyton ShiehJeremiah A Johnson

Abstract

Thermosets-polymeric materials that adopt a permanent shape upon curing-have a key role in the modern plastics and rubber industries, comprising about 20 per cent of polymeric materials manufactured today, with a worldwide annual production of about 65 million tons1,2. The high density of crosslinks that gives thermosets their useful properties (for example, chemical and thermal resistance and tensile strength) comes at the expense of degradability and recyclability. Here, using the industrial thermoset polydicyclopentadiene as a model system, we show that when a small number of cleavable bonds are selectively installed within the strands of thermosets using a comonomer additive in otherwise traditional curing workflows, the resulting materials can display the same mechanical properties as the native material, but they can undergo triggered, mild degradation to yield soluble, recyclable products of controlled size and functionality. By contrast, installation of cleavable crosslinks, even at much higher loadings, does not produce degradable materials. These findings reveal that optimization of the cleavable bond location can be used as a design principle to achieve controlled thermoset degradation. Moreover, we introduce a class...Continue Reading

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Citations

Aug 28, 2020·Macromolecular Rapid Communications·Kerui ChenKai Guo
Oct 7, 2020·Nature Communications·Yangju LinStephen L Craig
Nov 17, 2020·Macromolecular Rapid Communications·Hanna TraegerStephen Schrettl
Jun 12, 2021·Nature Materials·James L BanalMark Bathe
Jul 10, 2021·Advanced Materials·Xin ZhaoHan Sen Soo
Sep 4, 2021·Advanced Materials·Cheng LiuHuaping Xu
Sep 1, 2021·Journal of Hazardous Materials·Mingna ZhengWenxing Wang
Sep 17, 2021·Journal of the American Chemical Society·Hee Joong KimChristopher J Ellison
Oct 23, 2021·Journal of the American Chemical Society·Maxim Ratushnyy, Aleksandr V Zhukhovitskiy
Oct 23, 2021·Journal of the American Chemical Society·Banruo HuangF Dean Toste

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
rheology
NMR
scraping
confocal microscopy

Software Mentioned

LIPIT

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