Enhancing Fracture Properties of Flexible Materials through Unidirectional Twisting of Polymer Chains
발표자
()
초록
내용
Polymer materials are used in various fields such as freeform electronics and stretchable displays. To develop advanced devices, flexible materials must demonstrate high durability under repeated stretching. This requires high values of fracture strength, fracture toughness, and fatigue threshold simultaneously. Improving the fatigue threshold is particularly challenging, as natural rubber has a low value of 50 J/m². There is also no general design rule that enhances all these properties at once. This study proposes a new strategy to enhance the fracture properties of materials through unidirectional twisting of polymer chains. We used a supramolecular polymerization motif and molecular chirality to achieve this. By inducing self-assembly in solution, we formed a polymer network crosslinked by helical supramolecular structures. Our approach showed that networks with uniformly twisted helices exhibit significantly better fracture properties compared to randomly twisted helices.