Phase Behavior, Chain Packing, and Local Dynamics in Solid Polyolefin Blends

本项目旨在了解聚合物组成、链结构和单链动力学在确定聚烯烃共混物在小于固态回转半径的长度尺度上的局部结构中所起的作用。固体核磁共振将是询问选定共混物的形态和动力学的主要工具。磁共振非常适合于选择性地探测大分子的结构和动力学，即使对于没有任何特殊同位素标记方案的聚合物混合物也是如此。这项工作的结果将是在链水平上详细了解固体聚烯烃共混物的结构/相容性关系，这将导致基于设计的链结构的新的共混物组成，从而产生新的工业有用的材料。研究生和本科生将应用最新的仪器仪表和聚合物合成技术，该领域强大的行业关系将为工作合作提供充足的机会。反过来，他们将与北卡罗来纳州立大学地区的中学生分享这些经验，作为一个项目的一部分，该项目旨在让这些学生接触到聚合物科学的令人兴奋的方面。聚合物是一种由极大分子制成的材料，在从食品包装到航空航天复合材料的许多重要商业领域都有应用。这类材料中有饱和碳氢化合物聚合物，或称聚烯烃，它们是最重要的经济工业聚合物之一。受过新型聚合物材料设计“科学”训练的研究学生将在工业和学术领域的就业机会方面具有很强的竞争力。

This project aims to understand the role of polymer composition, chain architecture, and individual chain dynamics in determining local structure at length scales less than the radius of gyration in the solid state for polyolefin blends. Solid state nuclear magnetic resonance will be the chief tool used to interrogate the morphology and dynamics in selected blends. Magnetic resonance is ideally suited for selectively probing structure and dynamics in macromolecules, even for polymer blends prepared without any special isotopic labeling schemes. The result of this work will be a detailed understanding of structure/miscibility relationships for solid polyolefin blends at the chain level, which should lead to novel blend compositions based on designed chain architectures, and therefore, new and industrially useful materials. Graduate and undergraduate research students will apply the latest instrumentation and polymer synthesis techniques, and strong industrial relationships in this area will afford ample opportunity for working collaborations. In turn, they will share these experiences with middle school students in the North Carolina State University area as part of a project to develop programs for exposing these students to exciting aspects of polymer science.Polymers are a class of materials made from extremely large molecules that find applications in many important commercial areas ranging from food packaging to aerospace composites. Within this class of materials are the saturated hydrocarbon polymers, or polyolefins, which are among the most economically important industrial polymers. The research students trained in the "science" of designing new polymeric materials will be very competitive for employment opportunities in both the industrial and academic sectors.