Elastomers play an irreplaceable role in our society due to their unique properties. Natural rubber is directly obtained from plants and widely used tires, shoes, etc. Recently, modified natural rubbers are proposed expand the application of rubber. However, these have a limited variety molecular structures may not be able meet ever-demanding applications. Traditional synthetic elastomers prope...

We study the low-frequency, long-wavelength dynamics of liquid crystal elastomers, crosslinked in the smectic-A phase, in their smectic-A, biaxial smectic and smectic-C phases. Two different yet related formulations are employed. One formulation describes the pure hydrodynamics and does not explicitly involve the Frank director, which relaxes to its local equilibrium value in a nonhydrodynamic ...

Inspired by mammalian skins, soft hybrids integrating the merits of elastomers and hydrogels have potential applications in diverse areas including stretchable and bio-integrated electronics, microfluidics, tissue engineering, soft robotics and biomedical devices. However, existing hydrogel-elastomer hybrids have limitations such as weak interfacial bonding, low robustness and difficulties in p...

Harnessing surface wrinkle surfaces in various functional devices has been a hot topic. However, rapidly creating wrinkled on elastomers of arbitrary shape (especially curved surfaces) is still great challenge. In this work, an ultrasonic-assisted deposition method proposed to achieve nanomodification the robust layer (e.g., carbon nanotubes (CNTs)) with labyrinth pattern polydimethylsiloxane (...

Charge transport mechanisms governing DC resistance degradation in ferroelectric films are influenced by defects, particularly oxygen vacancies. This paper demonstrates that vacancies migrate lead zirconate titanate (PZT) under a bias field and contribute to degradation. Model PZT thin were developed which the concentration distribution of controlled via (a) changing dopant type from 1%–4% Mn (...

Importance of intermolecular forces (interactions of molecular chains) in the characteristic mechanical behavior of elastomers is studied. To focus on the microstructure of sulfur vulcanized rubbers, different network structures of NR/SBR elastomeric blends are investigated. The main difference of these structures comes from the ratio of sulfur to accelerator content in the curing systems. This...

In most synthetic elastomers, changing the physical properties by monomer choice also results in a change to the crystallinity of the material, which manifests through alteration of its mechanical performance. Using organocatalyzed stereospecific additions of thiols to activated alkynes, high-molar-mass elastomers were isolated via step-growth polymerization. The resulting controllable double-b...

Vibrational spectroscopy plays a prominent role in the research and development of polymers. It provides useful information on their chemical, conformational, crystal and morphological structure. The study of elastomers by Raman spectroscopy has been desirable for a long time. It has allowed quantitative work on blends and isomeric elastomers and also the direct study of the rubber vulcanisatio...