Solvent-Free Synthesis of the Polymer Electrolyte via Photo-Controlled Radical Polymerization: Toward Ultrafast In-Built Fabrication of Solid-State Batteries under Visible Light

Ultraviolet Light Debondable Optically Clear Adhesives for Flexible Displays through Efficient Visible-Light Curing

With growing sustainability concerns, the need for products that facilitate easy disassembly and reuse has increased. Adhesives, initially designed for bonding, now face demands for selective removal, enabling rapid assembly-disassembly and efficient maintenance across industries. This need is particularly evident in the display industry, with the rise of foldable devices necessitating specialized adhesives. A novel optically clear adhesive (OCA) is presented for foldable display, featuring a unique UV-stimulated selective removal feature. This approach incorporates benzophenone derivatives into the polymer network, facilitating rapid debonding under UV irradiation. A key feature of this method is the adept use of visible-light-driven radical polymerization for OCA film fabrication. This method shows remarkable compatibility with various monomers and exhibits orthogonal reactivity to benzophenone, rendering it ideal for large-scale production. The resultant OCA not only has high transparency and balanced elasticity, along with excellent resistance to repeated folding, but it also exhibits significantly reduced adhesion when exposed to UV irradiation. By merging this customized formulation with strategically integrated UV-responsive elements, an effective solution is offered that enhances manufacturing efficiency and product reliability in the rapidly evolving field of sustainable electronics and displays. This research additionally contributes to eco-friendly device fabrication, aligning with emerging technology demands.

3D Printing Nanostructured Solid Polymer Electrolytes with High Modulus and Conductivity

The development of advanced solid-state energy-storage devices is contingent upon finding new ways to produce and manufacture scalable, high-modulus solid-state electrolytes that can simultaneously provide high ionic conductivity and robust mechanical integrity. In this work, an efficient one-step process to manufacture solid polymer electrolytes composed of nanoscale ion-conducting channels embedded in a rigid crosslinked polymer matrix via Digital Light Processing 3D printing is reported. A visible-light-mediated polymerization-induced microphase-separation approach is utilized, which produces materials with two chemically independent nanoscale domains with highly tunable nanoarchitectures. By producing materials containing a poly(ethylene oxide) domain swelled with an ionic liquid, robust solid polymer electrolytes with outstanding room-temperature (22 °C) shear modulus (G' > 10⁸ Pa) and ionic conductivities up to σ = 3 × 10^-4 S cm^-1 are achieved. The nanostructured 3D-printed electrolytes are fabricated into a custom geometry and employed in a symmetric carbon supercapacitor, demonstrating the scalability of the fabrication and the functionality of the electrolyte. Critically, these high-performance materials are manufactured on demand using inexpensive and commercially available 3D printers, which allows the facile modular design of solid polymer electrolytes with custom geometries.

Controlling mechanical properties of 3D printed polymer composites through photoinduced reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization

Reversible addition–fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerization has been exploited to design silica-nanoparticle-incorporated photocurable resins for 3D printing of materials with enhanced mechanical properties and complex structures.