Reversible Nanocomposite by Programming Amorphous Polymer Conformation Under Nanoconfinement

TFY Chen and YW Qian and A Laine and J Kwon and LF Liu and S Pal and S Gupta and E Vargo and GM Su and RO Ritchie and S Keten and R Wang and M Salmeron and T Xu, ADVANCED MATERIALS, 37 (2025).

DOI: 10.1002/adma.202415352

Nanoconfinements are utilized to program how polymers entangle and disentangle as chain clusters to engineer pseudo bonds with tunable strength, multivalency, and directionality. When amorphous polymers are grafted to nanoparticles that are one magnitude larger in size than individual polymers, programming grafted chain conformations can "synthesize" high-performance nanocomposites with moduli of approximate to 25GPa and a circular lifecycle without forming and/or breaking chemical bonds. These nanocomposites dissipate external stresses by disentangling and stretching grafted polymers up to approximate to 98% of their contour length, analogous to that of folded proteins; use both polymers and nanoparticles for load bearing; and exhibit a non-linear dependence on composition throughout the microscopic, nanoscopic, and single-particle levels.

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