Characterizing Design Elements to Render Bottlebrush Polymers Biomimetic Colloidal Liquid Crystals

Project Description

Nature’s structural materials, such as wood, silk, tendon, and bone, possess mechanical strength and flexibility while being remarkably light. These exceptional properties arise from the repetitive, fractal-like ordering of anisotropic nanoscale polymeric building blocks into multiscale materials. These natural nanomaterial constituents, such as tropocollagen and cellulose nanocrystals, are characterized by rod-like structure with a high aspect ratio that gives rise to their arrangement into fibers. This project seeks to advance bottlebrush polymers (BBPs) as a modular nanofibril unit for the programmable assembly of synthetic materials with fibrous structures and mechanical properties that match those of biological materials and additionally incorporate stimuli responsiveness, providing opportunities for soft robotics and tissue engineering applications.

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