CPOS Seminar: Functional Motifs for Self-reporting and Stimuli-responsive Materials

Speaker: Livius F. Muff, Ph.D., Department of Materials, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; C. M. Bates, C. J. Hawker, Read de Alaniz Groups; UC Santa Barbara 

Abstract: Materials that change their color, shape, and mechanical properties in response to external stimuli, such as light, heat, electricity, or magnetic fields, have piqued the curiosity of scientists from different research areas for decades. Research on stimuli-responsive motifs, including photoswitches, mechanophores, and shape memory materials have enabled recent advances in soft robotics, drug delivery systems, and sensors. Despite progress, stimuli-responsive materials have limited commercial applications, with photochromic sunglasses being a rare example. The limited commercial success of stimuli-responsive materials stems from the complex, sensitive, inefficient, and incompatible chemistry needed for their synthesis and/or operation. We propose a new class of stimuli-responsive motifs as co-polymerizable additives for polyurethane syntheses to create commercially relevant polymers that change their appearance when subjected to mechanical forces or in response to light irradiation.