Responsive polymer network interfaces: From mechanical surface instabilities to ionic heterojunctions

Stimuli-responsive polymer networks offer potential for materials with a wide variety of tunable surface properties including optical characteristics, electronic properties, bioactivity, and adhesivity. Through a series of early- and mid-career federally-funded projects, our group has explored the fundamental responses, and corresponding changes in properties, of soft polymer interfaces in a variety of contexts. Following a brief summary of our early work on mechanical surface instability modes, this talk will transition to recent findings related to ionic heterojunctions at the interface between single-ion conducting polymer networks of opposite polarity.