Room temperature 3D printing of super-soft and solvent-free elastomers

Renxuan Xie; Sanjoy Mukherjee; Adam E Levi; Veronica G Reynolds; Hengbin Wang; Michael L Chabinyc; Christopher M Bates

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abc6900

Room temperature 3D printing of super-soft and solvent-free elastomers

Sci Adv. 2020 Nov 13;6(46):eabc6900. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abc6900. Print 2020 Nov.

Authors

Renxuan Xie^{1

2}, Sanjoy Mukherjee^{1

2}, Adam E Levi³, Veronica G Reynolds^{2

4}, Hengbin Wang², Michael L Chabinyc^{5

4}, Christopher M Bates^{6

3

4

7}

Affiliations

¹ Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
² Mitsubishi Chemical Center for Advanced Materials, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
³ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
⁴ Materials Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
⁵ Mitsubishi Chemical Center for Advanced Materials, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA. [email protected] [email protected].
⁶ Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA. [email protected] [email protected].
⁷ Department of Chemical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.

Abstract

Super-soft elastomers derived from bottlebrush polymers show promise as advanced materials for biomimetic tissue and device applications, but current processing strategies are restricted to simple molding. Here, we introduce a design concept that enables the three-dimensional (3D) printing of super-soft and solvent-free bottlebrush elastomers at room temperature. The key advance is a class of inks comprising statistical bottlebrush polymers that self-assemble into well-ordered body-centered cubic sphere phases. These soft solids undergo sharp and reversible yielding at 20°C in response to shear with a yield stress that can be tuned by manipulating the length scale of microphase separation. The addition of a soluble photocrosslinker allows complete ultraviolet curing after extrusion to form super-soft elastomers with near-perfect recoverable elasticity well beyond the yield strain. These structure-property design rules create exciting opportunities to tailor the performance of 3D-printed elastomers in ways that are not possible with current materials and processes.

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