Exploring Actuation and Mechanotransduction Properties of Polymer Brushes

Abstract

Soft nanotechnology requires new approaches and materials to efficiently convert chemical energy into mechanical motion and vice versa. A number of key design parameters, such as responsiveness to external stimuli, directionality of response through alignment, transduction via surface stresses or changes in ionic conductivity can be found in polymer brushes and several recent examples of actuation and transduction in polymer brushes will be explored.magnified image

Ionic Transport Through Single Solid‐State Nanopores Controlled with Thermally Nanoactuated Macromolecular Gates

“…We demonstrate the creation of “fully artificial” smart nanopores with tunable nanoscale diameters controlled by temperature changes in the physiological range. These results demonstrate the huge potential of “soft nanotechnology”28, 29 to emulate and replicate complex biological functions using soft matter‐based man‐made systems.…”

Micron-scale channel formation by the release and bond-back of pre-stressed thin films: A finite element analysis

“…Various strategies such as photo-lithography (Okazaki, 1991), focused ion beams (Moon et al, 2007) and soft lithography (Xia and Whitesides, 1998) have been explored in the last three decades to manufacture small structures for a variety of technological applications. Much attention has been focused on developing new techniques to generate ordered surface patterns or wrinkles at the nano-and micron scale for use in a wide range of microsystems, such as flexible electronics (Sun et al, 2006;Jiang et al, 2007a;Baca et al, 2008;Lacour et al, 2003;Hsu et al, 2002), tunable optical gratings (Xia et al, 1996;Edmondson and Huck, 2004;Harrison et al, 2004), replicas for microfluidic channels (Edmondson et al, 2006), microfluidic channels (Mei et al, 2007;Malachias et al, 2008), actuation/sensing devices (Comrie and Huck, 2008), particle separators (Efimenko et al, 2005), microreactors (Watts and Wiles, 2007), surfaces for marine anti-fouling (Efimenko et al, 2009), tissue engineering (Langer and Vacanti, 1993) and templates for microstructure fabrication (Peng et al, 2004;Schäffer et al, 2000).…”

Stabilization of polymer colloid dispersions with pH-sensitive poly-acrylic acid brushes

“…Instead, under strongly acidic conditions, because of protonation of the carboxylic groups, they become weakly charged and more hydrophobic with the backbone in a collapsed state, less soluble in water. Accordingly, weak PEs can be used to form brushes on polymeric surfaces, which respond to pH changes in the environment, leading to potential applications in various areas such as nano-scale actuators [10], membrane modifiers for pH-controlled permeation [4,11], charge-driven reversible polymer and protein adsorption [4,[12][13][14], nanoparticle stabilization [15], etc.…”