Soft materials, such as polymers, colloids, surfactants, and liquid crystals, are a technologically important class of matter employed in a variety of applications. One subclass of soft material, block copolymers, provides the opportunity to design materials with attractive chemical, thermal, and mechanical properties based on the ability to assemble into periodic structures with nanoscale features. Several applications for block copolymers currently under investigation in my group include sustainable and renewable polymers for thermoplastic elastomers, pressure sensitive adhesives, and thermosetting resins; battery and fuel cell membranes; and nanocarriers for delivery and separations applications. In this talk, I will highlight two recent areas of progress in my group related to (1) the design of renewable and sustainable block copolymers for elastomer applications, and (2) the development of novel tapered block copolymer systems to allow independent optimization of polymer thermal and mechanical properties, ion transport, and processing. In the first area, we have developed several new methods for using waste products from the pulp and paper industry, such as lignin, to generate well-defined block copolymers that can become potential low-cost and less-toxic alternatives to some styrene-based materials. We can control isomer contents in these materials to tune thermal and mechanical properties. In the second area, we have introduced synthetic modifications to the junctions between copolymer blocks to impact the effective interactions between blocks and optimize application-oriented properties such as ionic conductivity and mechanical stability. Though these appear to be two disparate topics, each area is linked by our understanding of self-assembly and nanoscale stability in macromolecular systems.
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