Investigating new polymerisation routes to (bio)degradable and sustainable polymers

研究领域：材料科学背景：全球对新型聚合物的需求正在迅速增长，有几种方法正在针对解决这一问题。尽管传统结构材料的长期命运仍然是一个突出的问题，但创造新的单体，寻找可再生资源或现有单体的制造路线是一项关键活动。将采用一种新的研究策略，允许“下降”制造生产感兴趣的聚合物，同时对工业实践和供应链造成最小的破坏。该学生将强烈参与工业需求，利用新型化学物质，同时寻求从根本上理解和优化聚合机制，并开发能够预测性能的结构/性质关系。建立这些新聚合物的可持续性议程还要求学生研究（生物）可降解性，并为合成中纳入的单体寻找可再生资源。学生将加入一个活跃的团队，该团队正在研究新化学的细节，并与工业互动，包括在比传统实验室环境更大的规模上生产聚合物样品，同时专注于可持续实践。利用新的聚合物合成路线来创造定制的“可降解”聚合物，目的是与工业伙伴合作，扩大这些反应的规模，并将产品加工成功能材料。作为这项工作的一部分，将与上述工业伙伴合作选择成功的材料进行测试，从而为目前许多家用产品中使用的材料提供绿色替代品。为了研究生物源材料合成新型聚合物的适用性，这一领域目前被石油原料材料所掩盖。学生的目标是通过创造与学术界和工业界现有材料相当或更好的替代材料的方法，为弥合这一差距做出贡献。3. 降低整个物料生产过程的总能耗。学生将通过设计更环保的反应条件（溶剂等）和使用之前讨论过的新型聚合物合成来实现这一目标，从而赋予新合成材料可持续的功能，同时降低总体能源成本。完成这些问题的方法：1。深入研究政府/学术文献，并对科学家在确定如何将材料分类为“绿色”，“可持续”，“可生物降解”以及与该领域相关的所有术语时所面临的各种挑战获得公正的理解。这将通过学生与学术和工业合作伙伴的合作来实现，以充分了解材料从实验室生产到全球分销的影响。优化研究小组开发的新型聚合技术，以生产新的可持续材料，无论是在开发高质量生物衍生材料的新途径方面，还是在材料中赋予可降解功能方面，为目前许多家庭产品中存在的环境不友好材料提供替代品3。利用对可持续性分类的理解来设计分析方法，以便量化所述可持续性，并扩大通过这些测试认为成功的材料的合成。这种放大将使学生了解其材料生产的能源需求，这是在实验室规模合成中经常被忽视的一个因素。

Research area: Materials ScienceBackground:The global need for new polymers is growing rapidly and several approaches are being targeted to address this issue. Creating new monomers, and searching for renewable sources or manufacturing routes for existing monomers, is a key activity although the long-term fate of materials with conventional structures is still an outstanding problem. A new research strategy will be utilised, allowing "drop in" manufacturing to produce polymers of interest whilst causing minimal disruption to industrial practices and supply chains. The student will be engaging strongly with industrial needs, utilising novel chemistries whilst seeking to fundamentally understand and optimise the mechanism of polymerisation and develop structure/property relationships able to predict performance. Establishing the sustainability agenda for these new polymers will also require the student to investigate (bio)degradability and seek out renewable sources for monomers incorporated in their synthesis. The student will join an active team that is researching the fine details of the new chemistry and interacting with industry, including producing polymer samples at larger scales than the traditional laboratory setting, all whilst focusing on sustainable practices.Objectives:1. To utilise novel polymer synthesis routes in order to create bespoke "degradable" polymers, with an aim to collaborate with industrial partners and scale these reactions up and process the products as functional materials. As part of this, successful materials will be selected for testing in collaboration with the aforementioned industrial partners, allowing for a green alternative to materials currently used in many household products.2. To investigate the applicability of the novel polymer synthesis with bio sourced materials, an area that is currently massively overshadowed by petroleum feedstock-based materials. The student will aim to contribute towards bridging this gap by creating methods that produce materials with equivalent or better alternatives to those currently available in academia and industry. 3. To reduce the overall energy consumption throughout the entire material production process. The student will achieve this by designing greener reaction conditions (solvents etc.) and by using the previously discussed novel polymer synthesis to impart sustainable functionality onto new materials synthesised whilst reducing the overall energy cost.The Approach to completing these issues:1. Researching in depth government/academic literature and gaining an unbiased understanding of the various challenges that scientists have faced when determining how to classify materials as "green", "sustainable", "biodegradable" and all of the terms associated with this field. This will be achieved by the student collaborating with academic and industrial partners to fully understand the impact of materials from their production in the lab to their distribution worldwide.2. Optimising the novel polymerisation techniques developed within the research group to produce new sustainable materials, both in terms of new routes to developing high quality bioderived materials and imparting degradable functionality into materials to provide alternatives to the environmentally unfriendly materials currently present in many household products3. Using the understanding of how sustainability is classified to design analytical methods in order to quantify said sustainability and scaling up the synthesis of materials deemed to be successful by these tests. This scale up will allow the student to understand the energy demands of their material production, a factor that is often overlooked in lab scale synthesis.