Ms. Yifan Liao - Ph.D. Candidate
11/09/2025
david Wang Auditorium, 3rd Floor, Dalia Maydan Bldg.
13:30
Mechanophores are molecular sensors that visually indicate mechanical stress within materials. However, their use has largely been restricted to polymeric systems due to synthetic challenges—the need for direct polymerization of functional monomers. In this work, we present a versatile, click-chemistry based strategy for integrating mechanophores into a wide variety of materials. This universal approach has been successfully applied to synthetic polymers, biopolymers such as carbohydrates and proteins, and even to the creation of force-responsive coatings on other substrates. Our method enables detectable mechanochromic responses at strain levels as low as 5%, with significantly improved sensitivity, compared to traditional polymer based techniques. The simplicity and modularity of this strategy facilitate straightforward mechanophore customization, paving the way for advanced applications such as 3D force mapping in mechanobiology and real-time stress visualization in coated materials.