(557e) Engineering Polymer Physics and Processing for Advanced Materials

Polymers have played vital roles in nearly every application in the current era; as such, their process-structure-property has been thoroughly investigated for decades. The recent advancement in nano-scale fabrication, additive manufacturing, and wearable technologies have resulted in the discovery and engineering of novel properties that arise from polymer and its composites. The Park research group leads both computational and experimental efforts to harness such properties of polymer/composites to manufacture advanced materials. To this end, this talk will focus on recent efforts by Park research group on three topics: i) smart stimuli-responsive fibers and textiles, and ii) multi-material additive manufacturing. Firstly, self-crimping polyester fibers in a side-by-side configuration based on mismatching modulus and coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) between the two components are fabricated by bicomponent melt-spinning. Due to the change in crystallinity and its morphology, appreciable change in curvature is observed over the wearable temperature of -20 °C to 20 °C. When non-woven fabrics of the fibers are tested, they show an excellent collective response to temperature. Secondly, a new co-extruded filaments of high/low Tg combinations of PC/ABS for 3d printing is presented. The print parts from these filaments enable thermal annealing above Tg of ABS while maintaining dimensional fidelity of built parts; these yield enhanced interlayer adhesion in print-build orientation to yield close to injection-molded ABS tensile strength.