Photo-Rheometer for Soft Material Characterization

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Canada’s strategic areas of innovation in energy, health, information, communication and natural resources, are all reliant upon material advancements. Soft materials, specifically polymers, contribute to many of the new products from these sectors. The underlying information critical to developing new soft materials is knowledge of their solid- and melt-state deformational properties. This characterization tells researchers how a new material will perform in use as well as give valuable details of its structure. The requested instrument, a rheometer, studies polymers by melt deformation and is often the only means to study these materials due to their inability to be dissolved into solvents for use in other characterization instruments. Training students in rheological characterization provides them with a means to understand molecular scale details and with that knowledge they gain insight into how variations in properties may be obtained. Mastery of rheology is expected of all students within the technical areas of polymer science & engineering. Canadian universities like McMaster have had historically strong research programmes focused on rheology, which over the past forty years have trained students that went on to become technical leaders in our industries as well as many of Canada’s current cohort of research professors working on material advancement. Supplying the rheometer with a requested UV/Vis curing attachment will allow the applicants to explore new research areas by providing a unique instrument to our region that is capable of photo-rheometry. A photo-rheometer combines melt deformational analysis with the capacity to grow or modify polymer within the instrument by initiating light-sensitive reactants. There is scarce access to photo-rheometers in Canadian academia, and our existing basic rheometer unit is too old be to augmented with a UV curing attachment. The requested instrument is a user-friendly device that functions as both photo rheometer and standard rheometer, which will be used to train graduate students and post-docs in the preparation and characterization of molecularly controlled soft materials. The photorheometer, is to be housed in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and will be available to researchers in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, School of Biomedical Engineering and other Departments in the University.