Dr. Marek Urban

Abstract:

This lecture will address the development of a new generation of self-healable copolymers capable of electrical energy storage, forming higher-than-binary logic circuits. Under non-equilibrium conditions, polar-dipolar interactions facilitate the ion-lock energy storage that can be maintained for extended times. These attributes can be obtained by the precise copolymerization of an ionic liquid monomer composed of covalently affixed dipolar aliphatic spacers and tails enabling cation-anion polarization. The degree of cation-anion pair polarization governs the energy storage beyond classical approximations, whereas ion-dipole, dipole-induced dipole, and dipole-dipole coupling facilitate multi-logic circuitry, thus providing an opportunity for the development of higher-than-binary logic systems with multi-valued logic gates, making them attractive materials in quantum computing, fuzzy logic, or modeling uncertainty. These composition-driven copolymers exhibit self-healing properties due to significant entropy increases, causing energy dissipation and reversible segmental rearrangements to achieve energetically favorable states. The combination of directional and non-directional entropy-driven interchanges appears promising for identifying poly(ionic liquid) copolymer architectures capable of mechanical adaptability, dynamic self-healing, sustainability, and ionic conductivity.