Materials Design: Liquid Crystalline Polymer Coatings via Chemical Vapor Deposition
Abstract
Liquid crystalline polymer (LCP) coatings offer avenues for the fabrication of devices with smart surfaces incorporating responsive topography, reflectivity, or polarization. Solution-phase synthesis methods limit LCP coatings to predominately planar substrate geometries because surface tension effects result in non-uniform coatings on non-planar or structured surfaces. Open opportunities reside in developing processing methods that incorporate LCPs into non-planar devices and provide tunability in local composition. To address critical challenges in (1) minimizing required quantities of reactive mesogens and (2) translating anisotropic properties of mesogenic materials into three-dimensional devices, we aim to develop vapor-phase deposition methods to prepare conformal LCP coatings. The central aims of this work are to initiate new processing of mesogenic materials via vapor-phase deposition while also addressing open questions in soft matter physics regarding interfacial polymerization and responsive transitions in LCP composites. This project supports the central mission of the ARO Materials Science Division in expanding start-of-the-art materials processing of advanced multi-component and responsive composites.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 02, 2020
- Source ID
- W911NF2110031
Entities
People
- Laura C Bradley
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army
- University of Massachusetts Amherst