'Soft crosslinking' strategy makes brittle, glassy plastics tougher
Glassy polymers are those whose chains become immobilized below their glass transition temperature. The immobilized chains make them hard and stiff but also brittle, causing them to fracture when stretched. One promising strategy for overcoming this trade-off is to incorporate ionic groups whose reversible electrostatic attractions form physical crosslinks that improve toughness while maintaining…
Researchers from Tokyo University of Science have developed a novel ionic comb polymer that combines a comb-shaped architecture with bulky 4-dimethylaminopyridine (DMAP) counterions to create a homogeneous nanostructure with uniformly distributed ionic interactions. This innovative design allows glassy polymers to maintain stiffness while also achieving toughness, overcoming the trade-off between these two properties.
The study, conducted by Dr. Daisuke Aoki, Kotaro Uchiyama, Ryotaro Miyazawa, and Professor Koji Arimitsu, demonstrated that the DMAP-neutralized polymers exhibited exceptional toughness of approximately 137 MJ/m³ and a high Young's modulus of approximately 0.9 GPa, making them four times tougher and twice as stiff as the nonionic precursor.
This breakthrough challenges the conventional understanding of glassy polymers and paves the way for the development of materials that are both hard and tough.
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