Manufacturing of Materials with Regenerative Capabilities

The features responsible for the desirable mechanical properties of thermosetting materials present challenges to their recycling and reuse. Facilitating the end-of-life management of thermosets while retaining desired properties is largely an unmet challenge. This presentation will discuss efforts towards imparting thermosetting materials with regenerative abilities. Our approach relies on incorporating tailored chemical functionality within thermoset crosslinks to enable crosslink exchange, thereby enabling polymer remolding. Designing our chemical functionality to be compatible with Frontal Ring Opening Metathesis Polymerization (FROMP) enables rapid adoption of this manufacturing technique for the fabrication of materials with regenerative capabilities. We demonstrate these regenerative capabilities by subjecting material to several reprocessing cycles. Material characterization techniques reveal that the performance of the thermoset is preserved over many lifecycles and that reprocessing is enabled by our tailored functionality. Leveraging a chemical approach, we show that thermosets can rapidly and scalably manufactured with functionality that permits regenerative function while minimally compromising material performance over subsequent lifetimes.