TUNING POLYMER DYNAMICS AND PROPERTIES VIA CHAIN STUCTURAL HETEROGENEITY
Abstract
The proposed effort will lay a fundamental foundation for realizing a new generation of performance polymers in aerospace applications with improved thermal performance windows and transport properties. Control of these properties is a key goal in aerospace polymers, including applications such as aircraft, personal protective equipment, and energy storage, among others. This project aims to establish new strategies and understanding for use of advanced polymers integrating multiple repeating chemical groups to provide revolutionary control of these properties independently of other important properties such as chemical stability. This work is motivated by newly emerging evidence for the potential to manipulate polymer properties by combining distinct chemical groups in a controlled sequence along a macromolecule. Indeed, recent work suggests that these approaches can lead to large deviations from traditional mixing rules that have constrained the performance of traditional multi-chemistry polymers, enabling alloyed polymers with use temperatures, mechanical properties, and stabilities far outside those of the pure polymers corresponding to their constituents. Here we are therefore targeting the use of distinct chemistries and sequences to seek a transformational decoupling of chemical and physical properties in next generation polymers. This effort aims to understand these effects at a molecular level and establish design rules for these next generation polymers with targeted thermal, transport, and mechanical properties. To do so, this effort will combine advanced experiments probing polymer behavior at a local molecular scale with supercomputer simulations providing insights into how these molecules move and why.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Apr 20, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502210427
Entities
People
- Rodney D. Priestley
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Trustees of Princeton University
- United States Air Force