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Polymer and Organic Materials Commons

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Applied Mechanics

Elastocapillarity

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Full-Text Articles in Polymer and Organic Materials

Synthesis, Fabrication, And Assembly Of Mesoscale Polymer Filaments, Dylan M. Barber Mar 2022

Synthesis, Fabrication, And Assembly Of Mesoscale Polymer Filaments, Dylan M. Barber

Doctoral Dissertations

Mesoscale materials, with feature sizes in the range of one hundred nanometers to tens of micrometers, are ubiquitous in Nature. In organisms, mesoscale building blocks connect the properties of underlying molecular and nanoscructures to those of macroscale, organism-scale materials through hierarchical assemblies of recurring structural motifs. The collective action of large numbers of mesoscale features can afford stunning features like the structural color of the morpho butterfly wing, calcium ion-mediated movement in muscle, and wood structures like xylem that can support enormous external compressive loads and negative internal pressure to transport nutrients throughout an organism. In synthetic systems, the design, …


Source Data For Self-Spinning Filaments For Autonomously Linked Microfibers, Dylan M. Barber, Todd S. Emrick, Gregory Grason, Alfred Crosby Jan 2022

Source Data For Self-Spinning Filaments For Autonomously Linked Microfibers, Dylan M. Barber, Todd S. Emrick, Gregory Grason, Alfred Crosby

Data and Datasets

Filamentous bundles are ubiquitous in Nature, achieving highly adaptive functions and structural integrity from assembly of diverse mesoscale supramolecular elements. Engineering routes to synthetic, topologically integrated analogs demands precisely coordinated control of multiple filaments’ shapes and positions, a major challenge when performed without complex machinery or labor-intensive processing. Here, we demonstrate a photocreasing design that encodes local curvature and twist into mesoscale polymer filaments, enabling their programmed transformation into target 3-dimensional geometries. Importantly, patterned photocreasing of filament arrays drives autonomous spinning to form linked filament bundles that are highly entangled and structurally robust. In individual filaments, photocreases unlock paths 16 …