Comb and Bottlebrush Polymers with Superior Rheological and Mechanical Properties

Comb and bottlebrush polymers present a wide range of rheological and mechanical properties that can be controlled through their molecular characteristics, such as the backbone and side chain lengths as well as the number of branches per molecule or the grafting density. This review investigates the impact of these characteristics specifically on the zero shear viscosity, strain hardening behavior, and plateau shear modulus. It is shown that for a comb polymer with an entangled backbone and entangled side chains, a maximum in the strain hardening factor and minimum in the zero shear viscosity η₀ can be achieved through selection of an optimum number of branches q. Bottlebrush polymers with flexible filaments and extremely low plateau shear moduli relative to linear polymers open the door for a new class of solvent-free supersoft elastomers, where their network modulus can be controlled through both the degree of polymerization between crosslinks, n_x , and the length of the side chains, n_sc , with $$ .