Our long term objective is to understand how localized chemical reactions contribute to the response of polymeric materials to mechanical loads and to exploit such load-dependent reactivity in creating new (1) stress-responsive, actuating and other energy transducing materials and smart delivery systems; (2) tools for studying energy flows and dissipation pathways in synthetic and biological soft matter and (3) polymer processing methods (including recycling). To achieve this goal, we integrate synthesis, physicochemical measurements, quantum-chemical computations, statistical mechanical theory and a bit of engineering.
Localized reactions are often considered to be among the least tractable components of the complex hierarchy of processes - spanning many orders of magnitude in lengths and times - that determine the response of polymers to mechanical loads. A powerful approach to dealing with this complexity is to treat processes at different length and time scales separately (i.e., within different formalisms such as continuum mechanics, statistical mechanics or chemical kinetics) and use proper coupling between different models to recover the overall picture.
