UV-DEBOND · UV-Debondable Adhesives

Adhesives are essential in key sectors like electronics, automotive, and healthcare, yet their permanence hinders repair, recycling, and material recovery. Debondable adhesives represent a promising solution, but most current systems rely on heat as a trigger, which is difficult to localize and incompatible with heat-sensitive substrates. Light offers a transformative alternative, enabling remote, contactless, and spatiotemporally precise debonding. However, UV-debondable adhesives represent a little explored frontier, with current examples suffering from limited thermal stability, mechanical robustness, and reliability.UV-DEBOND aims to establish a new class of strong thermally stable adhesives designed to debond on demand upon UV exposure. The key innovation of UV-DEBOND is a new family of light-responsive cyclobutene-based monomers that can be copolymerized with vinyl monomers and thus easily be incorporated into adhesives made by radical polymerization. Upon UV exposure, the cyclobutene residues undergo cycloreversion reactions that cause a controlled molecular weight reduction that leads to debonding. In addition, UV-cleavable cross-linkers that can be cleaved through similar cycloreversion reactions will be used, enabling a complementary debonding mechanism. This dual strategy with backbone scission and reversible cross-links also represents a novel design concept not previously applied to adhesives.UV-DEBOND will deliver a new class of adhesives, impacting high-tech industries (e.g.- electronics, robotics, aerospace), enabling sustainable design, and emerging technologies where controlled bonding and debonding are critical. This interdisciplinary project integrates chemistry, materials science, and engineering, providing the researcher with broad, cross-sectoral training.Pioneering this molecular strategy will advance adhesive science, support the circular economy, and position the researcher as a future leader in functional polymer materials.