Xuyi, Zitang, and Bumjoon’s work on recyclable polymers featuring topochemically elongated and weakened carbon–carbon bonds has been published in JACS! Big congratulations!
We demonstrate a topochemical approach for creating elongated C–C bonds with a bond length of 1.57∼1.63 Å between repeating units with decreased bond dissociation energies. These materials exhibit rapid depolymerization via breakage of the elongated bond within a desirable temperature range (140∼260 °C) while otherwise remaining remarkably stable under harsh conditions. The topochemically prepared polymers are processable and 3D-printable while maintaining a high depolymerization yield and tunable mechanical properties. These results suggest that the crystalline polymers synthesized from simple photochemistry and without expensive catalysts are promising for practical applications with complete materials’ circularity. Read the paper here. Read a Blog on Medium here.
Letian Dou Group 