Macromolecular engineering: a synthetic perspective

Abstract

It has long been a desire for both the polymer academic and industrial (production and process) communities to gain a true understanding of the effects of molecular architecture variables upon polymer properties and the implications for polymer process engineering. It has also long been realised that the greatest chance of gaining this insight is not to work with industrial grade materials, which are usually polydisperse both in terms of molecular weight and architecture, but to study model polymers, synthesised in the laboratory, usually by technically challenging methods such as anionic polymerisation. It is only by using polymers in which the molecular variables such as molecular weight, polydispersity and long chain branching are controlled with a high degree of precision, that we can hope to correlate these variables with key physical properties such as melt rheology, crystallinity and solid state properties. As polymer theoreticians develop ever more sophisticated models to predict the relationships between molecular structure and physical properties the challenge to the synthetic polymer chemist is to design and build (engineer) ever more complex yet well defined molecular structures to allow experimental validation (or otherwise) of the models. Here the author discusses how the synthetic chemist has risen to meet that challenge over the years.

Keywords:

• BRANCHED POLYMERS
• ANIONIC POLYMERISATION
• DENDRIMACS