Electronic devices contain valuable and noxious metals that are today hardly recovered. While the demand for electronics is still growing, the urge for recyclable electronics development grows stronger. Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) are the core of electronics and contain electronic component that are fixed onto metal tracks through conductive adhesives. Such adhesives contain generally a metallic filler and a polymeric binder that is generally a polymerizable thermoset formulation.
With the increasing topics on material circularity, self-immolative polymers (SIP), polymer systems that have the ability to undergo depolymerization with a stimulus, have emerged in the recent years as viable systems to bring recyclability to polymer materials.

The current post-doc will develop a polymerizable SIP binder to be used in conductive adhesive in PCB applications. After the selection of adequate chemistries, the post-doc will synthesize SIP and evaluate their thermal and mechanical properties and their ability to depolymerize under stimulus. In a second step, the most promising SIP will be formulated as a conductive adhesive and will be applied to a PCB. The recyclability of the final object will be studied.