Polymers are a central part of today's economy, enabling many of the technologies and materials that make up our everyday lives. But polymers are much more than just the simple packaging plastics that might first come to mind. Today's polymers are amazingly adaptable chemicals that can be tuned and synthesised for some truly amazing applications.
This course focuses on the chemical reactions, mechanisms, and industrial techniques used to synthesise some of the more industrially important polymeric materials. While the course will deal primarily with chemistry, some polymer physics and properties will also be discussed. The course will start with an introduction to polymer science where you will learn what constitutes a polymer, what different classes of polymers exist and what general polymerisation strategies are open to the industrial chemist. The course will then explore step and chain polymerisation, including polycondensation, polyaddition, cationic and anionic chain polymerisation, as well as radical polymerisation. You will also study the industrially important process of copolymerisation in greater depth. In addition, we will discuss methods to analyse polymers, such as size exclusion chromatography. The course will finish with basic structure-property relationships for polymers, as well as introduce the concept of viscoelastic materials – the cornerstone for rubbers, elastomers, and thermoplastic materials.
This course is designed to give insight into the fundamentals of polymer science and therefore suitable for everybody without prior knowledge in polymers. The course would be of particular appeal to students interested in basic polymer chemistry as well as polymer related areas such as material science and the coating/paint industry, nanotechnology, biomaterials, membrane and separation science, as well as the packaging material industries.
