POLYMER CHEMISTRY AND MATERIALS
Contact: Prof. Christoph Weder
Motivated by the desire to create novel materials, which exhibit currently unavailable properties and enable new applications, the primary research focus of the Polymer Chemistry and Materials research team is the design, synthesis, and investigation of structure-property relationships of novel functional polymers. Examples of such materials include self-healing polymers, materials with adaptive mechanical properties, and plastics with built-in structural health monitors. Functional polymers, as a broad class, are attracting significant interest in academia and industry because these materials combine the attractive features of polymers – low cost, ease of processing, good mechanical characteristics – with the variety of readily-tailored functions that can be generated by carefully designed organic molecules. In particular, the potential to design the chemical structure of polymer molecules virtually at will and exert control over their supramolecular architecture facilitates control of the properties of this broad class of materials.
FROM FUNDAMENTAL STUDIES TO ADVANCED FUNCTIONAL MATERIALS
For the efficient development of new polymers, it is of fundamental importance to develop a predictive understanding of the relation between molecular structure and supramolecular architecture and the macroscopic property of interest. AMI’s interests and activities in this area are therefore highly interdisciplinary and range from the synthesis of new monomers and polymers to advanced polymer processing, to the in-depth investigation and (in some cases) technological exploitation of materials with unusual, but desirable optical, electronic, and/or mechanical properties.
Picture of a stimuli-responsive polymer, which changes its fluorescence color upon deformation
Electron microscopy image of a cellulose nanowhisker based aerogel
Picture of an electrically conductive polymer gel
