At the upcoming IUPAC Chains conference in The Hague, Simon will present his latest research about a new dynamic covalent (TAAD) motif for more robust boronate-based materials. If you’re attending, please you can come to Simon’s talk on Tuesday August 22 at 13.20h, in parallel session 24 (room Amazon).
What is more, Simon’s second paper has come out in the Journal of Polymer Science.
Congrats to Lucas for having two papers coming out in one week!
His paper in Advanced Materials Interfaces presents a grafting-to coating approach that yields polymer brushes up to an unprecedented thickness of 19 nm. To this end, an easy-to-apply poly(dopamine) primer layer was optimised to promote binding of a block copolymer with a reactive poly(glycidyl methacrylate) block.
In Lucas’ second paper that came out this week, published in Langmuir, he expanded on this grafting-to method, by demonstrating it can be used on a variety of substrates, and for a range of block copolymers.
Our recent review on Phase Separation in Supramolecular and Covalent Adaptable Networks has been published in Soft Matter. The review covers a broad range of important works and information regarding the developments and applications of phase separation in dynamic polymer networks. It highlights how material properties can be tuned and enhanced, but also discusses the underlying mechanisms behind phase separation. Thanks to Martijn de Heer Kloots, Sybren Schoustra and Joshua Dijksman for bringing this joint project to a successful end.
The article is available here (Open Access).
At the upcoming Dutch Polymer Days, both Annemieke and Simon will present their research:
If you’re attending DPD2023, please check out their lecture!
This week Vahid Asadi Alghalandis joined our group as a postdoctoral researcher. His research will focus on how the concept of phase separation can be used in covalent adaptable networks. Good luck, Vahid!
In the same week as Sybren’s PhD defence, his work on self-healing materials was covered by various media:
Today, Sybren successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Molecular Tuneability of Imine-based Covalent Adaptable Networks. Congrats to Sybren for this great achievement, and thanks his opponents, Filip Du Prez, Katja Loos, Hans Heuts and Jasper van der Gucht, for their participation in Sybren’s defence.
Our group has a PhD vacancy on a project that is focussed on polymer materials that contribute to a circular economy. This PhD position is part of our DynaBranch consortium that consists of partners from Wageningen University, Eindhoven University of Technology, Avans Hogeschool and SABIC as industrial partner/sponsor. Our consortium was awarded a KIC Circularity grant from NWO to develop a program on circular polymers.
The aim of this program is to increase the recyclability of an important class of engineering plastics: polycarbonates. For this, we will (chemically) modify polycarbonates by dynamic-covalent chemistry. These new polymers will be combined with existing polycarbonate (as part of a recycling stream) to achieve (re)processing that is compatible with existing infrastructure.
The overall project will cover topics from organic/polymer synthesis, polymer processing and characterisation, ageing and recycling studies, as well as socio-economic analyses related to the acceptance of these new materials.
If you would like to find out more about the vacancy and/or if you wish to apply, please use this link.
Just before he will defend his PhD thesis, Sybren’s paper on the stabilising effect of metal coordination in imine-based covalent adaptable networks has been published in Macromolecular Rapid Communications. Moreover, the work features on the front cover of the journal.
In the paper, Sybren describes the effect of choice of metal ion, corresponding counter anion, coordination motif and metal-to-ligand ratio on the material properties of polyimine networks.
You can read the full paper here.
Simon’s first paper has been accepted in Frontiers in Chemistry. Together with Marijn, Simon showed how a new dynamic-covalent motif, based on the TetraAzaAdamantane-boronic ester linkage, can be used to create covalent adaptable networks that are more robust than conventional (gel-like) boronic ester-based networks.
You can read the full paper here.
