Publication Date:
2018-10-27
Description:
The need for smart materials in advanced applications, has promoted significantly the research in the field of responsive (or active) materials. They are capable of some physical response to external stimuli, such as temperature, pH, light, mechanical stress, etc. so they can adapt themselves to the surrounding environment. In the present paper, we propose a mechanical model to describe the response of polymers containing mechanically responsive molecules (mechanophores), having the ability to assume two distinct geometrically stable configurations under mechanical actions or due to a change of the environment’s pH. When linked to the polymer’s chains, under a proper mechanical stress, they switch from one state to the other, triggering a macroscopic deformation of the material. Such an internal deformation, driven by the mechanophores’ activation, can be exploited to get a desired functionality of the polymer. Our model starts from the mechanical behavior at the microscopic lev...
Print ISSN:
1757-8981
Electronic ISSN:
1757-899X
Topics:
Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science, Production Engineering, Mining and Metallurgy, Traffic Engineering, Precision Mechanics
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