25th CEMS Colloquium

Speaker

Prof. Kohzo Ito (The University of Tokyo)

Date

17:30 - 18:30, February 19, 2015 (Thursday)

Venue

Okochi-Hall, RIKEN

Title

Slide-Ring Materials: Novel Concept for Tough Polymers

Abstract

A novel type of gel, called topological gel, has been recently developed by using the supramolecular architecture with topological characteristics. The most important feature of the topological gel is the strong coupling between the pulley effect and entropy of rings. The concept can be applied to not only gels but also to a wide variety of polymeric materials such as elastomer and resins without solvents. Then the polymeric materials with movable cross-links are referred as to slide-ring materials (SRM) in a wider sense. Accordingly it can be applied to paints, rubbers, soft actuator and so on. As a typical example, the scratch-resist properties of the self-restoring slide-ring elastomer were adopted into the top coating on the mobile phone.

References
1) Y. Okumura and K. Ito, Adv. Mater., 2001, 13, 485.
2) K. Kato and K. Ito, Soft Matter, 2011, 7, 8737.
3) K. Kato et al., Macromolecules, 2012, 46, 310.
4) K. Mayumi and K. Ito, Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 8179.
5) Y. Noda et al., J. App. Polym. Sci., 2014, 131, 40509