ORNL, Washington State researchers craft recipe for tunable
shape-memory polymer
(May 21, 2015) Not all plastics are created equal. Malleable
thermoplastics can be easily melted and reused in products such as food
containers. Other plastics, called thermosets, are essentially stuck in their
final form because of cross-linking chemical bonds that give them their
strength for applications such as golf balls and car tires.
“Nobody takes a thermoset and recycles it like you would a
water bottle,” said Orlando Rios from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge
National Laboratory.
Rios and a team of researchers from Washington State
University and the University of Idaho have developed a process to make a
thermoset that can be reshaped and reused. The team’s study, published in the
journal Macromolecules, is featured on the current issue’s cover.