Themed collection Editor’s Choice - Pengfei Cao

This review analyzes plastic carbonization with respect to existing utilization methods and details its use for production of activated carbon.

Photopolymerizable and degradable polyimides from liquid resins were developed, using existing economic chemical feedstocks, as flexible substrates to mitigate the e-waste crisis.

This work has developed strengthened ethylene-methacrylic acid ionomers by employing single-boron compounds as readily available cross-linkers.

In this study, poly(ionic liquid) (PIL) ABC triblock and ABCBA pentablock terpolymers (PILTTP and PILPTP, respectively) were synthesized to investigate the impact of chain architecture (ABC versus ABCBA) on properties and battery performance.

This study compares the thermal reprocessing potential of thermosets comprising associative or dissociative dynamic covalent bonds by evaluating their rheological behavior.

DFT calculations and experiments with four zinc salts as transesterification catalysts show discrepancies between computational and experimental flow activation energies, highlighting the importance of catalyst thermal stability and molecular size.

The goal of this work is to develop polymer-based solid-state electrolytes for sodium-ion battery applications. Two polymers are blended in order to reduce the T_g and decouple ionic conductivity from polymer segmental motion. Furthermore, the addition of plasticizers further enhances the ionic conductivity.

Efficient, fast and versatile depolymerization of bromine-terminated polymers.

Imine-based semiconducting polymers with thienoisoindigo-based monomers are 90% recoverable upon imine hydrolysis, enabling closed-loop recycling.

Direct ink writing of polyimide aerogels enables custom-fit thermal insulators, increasing the ionic conductivity of a solid-state electrolyte battery tenfold.

This paper reports a feasible system for the direct adhesion of cross-linked rubbers, by incorporating tetrazine ligands into a styrene–butadiene rubber followed by the addition of zinc dimethacrylate with the aim of forming reversible cross-links.

Degradable epoxy-amine thermosets derived from cyclic-ketal monomers offer robust performance and facile end-of-use processing, enabling recovery of diketone building blocks and pristine carbon fiber from fiber reinforced polymer composites.

Dicyclopentadiene monomer was incorporated into statistical copolymerizations with cyclopentene to determine its influence on the resulting copolymers. These dicyclopentadiene nanodomains acted as crosslinks providing strength to the uncured network.

This works reports on novel polyimine vitrimers from a bio-based and fully aromatic scaffold. The dynamic networks possess high-performance thermal stability and charring behavior with facile thermomechanical and viscoelastic tunability.