Photo-cross-linking of Anthracene as a Versatile Strategy to Design Shape Memory Polymers

Abstract

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are an important class of smart materials in polymer science, and have been attracting academic and industrial interests for many years. In the past decades, the fundamental aspects of SMPs have been comprehensively studied, and with the increasing demands for practical applications, researches on SMPs have been focused on molecular structure design, advanced design and manufacturing, where the photo-cross-linking of anthracene can benefit a lot. From the view of molecular structure design, the photo-cross-links of anthracene can versatilely work as either netpoint or molecular switch, depending on the specific circumstance of a SMP. In the aspect of manufacturing chemically cross-linked SMPs, the photo-cross-linking of anthracene shows great potential in photo-assisted 3D/4D printing via an approach of “Pre-Shaping and Post-curing”. Besides, the unique fluorescent property of anthracene enables photo-imaging based on localized photo-cross-linking, and this benefits information storage. This paper mainly presents our recent research process in using photo-cross-linking of anthracene to design various SMPs, including chemically triple SMPs, two-way SMPs, light-induced SMPs and multi-stimuli-responsive SMPs from the molecular structure level, and new application as a high-security information storage medium enabled by the combination of photo-imaging and shape memory technology (SMT).