CAREER: Recycled Polymers of Enhanced Strength and Toughness: Predicting Failure and Unraveling Deformation to Enable Circular Transitions

职业：增强强度和韧性的再生聚合物：预测失效和解开变形以实现圆形过渡

• 批准号: 2338508
• 负责人: Christos Athanasiou
• 金额: $ 68.25万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-09-01 至 2029-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2338508&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Recycled; Polymers; Enhanced; Strength

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant supports research that aims to understand the deformation and failure of recycled polymers, known as recyclates. Recyclates have been unable to replace virgin plastics because of their poor mechanical performance. This leads to resource depletion, waste, and pollution challenges. Preliminary work suggests that altering the internal structure of recyclates, by introducing distinct, self-assembled phases within them, improves their mechanical performance. However, investigating the deformation and failure of these self-assembled structures, which is necessary to enable their wider adoption and use, is extremely challenging due to their complex nature. This award supports fundamental research to predict how deformation and failure occurs in recyclates through sophisticated experiments and artificial intelligence. The findings will enhance scientific understanding and foster the development of advanced, recycled materials that could benefit multiple U.S. industries, advance sustainability, and conserve national resources. In parallel, the education, outreach, and borader impact activities aim to shape a diverse and agile U.S. workforce by offering new engineering skills and improving career prospects of marginalized individuals, with emphasis on individuals reentering the workforce from incarceration. This grant aims to support research that advances understanding of the deformation and failure of recyclates exhibiting self-assembled internal morphologies of improved strength and toughness through an integrated experimental and computational approach. The new mechanics discoveries by this research effort will enable the substitution of virgin plastics with recycled ones of similar mechanical performance resulting in circular transitions and addressing the pressing plastic pollution challenge. By exploiting the built-in energy potential present in immiscible polymer blends of heterogeneous recyclates, their internal architecture will be altered. This way, composites of enhanced mechanical properties with phase-separated, self-assembled three-dimensional morphologies, induced by thermophoresis, will be developed. The structure-property space of these recyclates will be explored and their complex failure and deformation will be investigated, while developing sophisticated experimental mechanics instrumentation to support such efforts. Coupling high-throughput, big-data generating experiments with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence algorithms will enable the prediction of failure evolution and the understanding of strength and toughness enhancement mechanisms. These predictions will unravel new deformation mechanisms for heterogeneous polymer composites. Such knowledge will also enable the establishment of new, reliable criteria for crack branching, curving and bifurcation, which have eluded researchers for decades. The research efforts will be closely tied to education, outreach, and broader impact activities which will work towards an integrated and inclusive mechanics education, by embedding sustainability in mechanics courses and engaging justice-impacted youth with engineering science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这项学院早期职业发展(Career)补助金支持旨在了解可回收聚合物的变形和失效的研究，这些聚合物被称为可回收物。由于机械性能较差，回收塑料一直无法取代原始塑料。这导致了资源枯竭、浪费和污染的挑战。初步工作表明，通过在回收物中引入不同的自组装相来改变回收物的内部结构，可以提高它们的机械性能。然而，由于这些自组装结构的复杂性，研究它们的变形和破坏是非常具有挑战性的，这对于它们的更广泛的采用和使用是必要的。该奖项支持基础研究，通过复杂的实验和人工智能来预测回收物中如何发生变形和破坏。这些发现将增进科学理解，促进先进的可回收材料的发展，这些材料可以造福于美国的多个行业，促进可持续发展，并节约国家资源。同时，教育、外展和边疆影响活动旨在通过提供新的工程技能和改善边缘化个人的职业前景来塑造多样化和灵活的美国劳动力队伍，重点是从监禁中重新进入劳动力大军。这笔赠款旨在支持研究，通过综合实验和计算方法，促进对表现出增强强度和韧性的自组装内部形态的再生材料的变形和失效的了解。这项研究的新力学发现将使原始塑料能够被机械性能相似的回收塑料取代，从而实现循环过渡，并解决紧迫的塑料污染挑战。通过利用不相容的聚合物混合物中存在的内在能量潜力，不同种类的回收物的内部结构将被改变。通过这种方法，将开发出具有相分离的、自组装的三维形态的热电泳力学性能增强的复合材料。将探索这些回收物的结构-性能空间，并调查其复杂的破坏和变形，同时开发复杂的实验力学仪器来支持这些努力。将高通量、大数据生成实验与最先进的人工智能算法相结合，将能够预测故障演变并了解强度和韧性增强机制。这些预测将揭开非均相聚合物复合材料新的变形机制。这些知识还将使建立新的、可靠的裂纹分支、弯曲和分叉标准成为可能，而这些标准几十年来一直没有得到研究人员的认可。研究工作将与教育、外展和更广泛的影响活动密切相关，这些活动将通过在力学课程中嵌入可持续发展和让受正义影响的年轻人参与工程科学来努力实现综合和包容的力学教育。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。