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

研究领域：材料科学背景：全球对新聚合物的需求正在迅速增长，正在针对几种方法来解决这一问题。创造新的单体，为现有单体寻找可再生资源或生产路线，是一项关键活动，尽管具有传统结构的材料的长期命运仍然是一个突出的问题。将利用一种新的研究战略，允许“减少”制造以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。学生将致力于工业需求，利用新的化学方法，同时寻求从根本上了解和优化聚合机理，并开发能够预测性能的结构/性能关系。制定这些新聚合物的可持续发展议程还要求学生调查(生物)降解性，并为合成中包含的单体寻找可再生来源。学生将加入一个活跃的团队，研究新化学的细节并与工业互动，包括生产比传统实验室环境更大规模的聚合物样品，同时专注于可持续实践。目标：1.利用新的聚合物合成路线来创造定制的“可降解”聚合物，目的是与工业合作伙伴合作，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，以实现目前在许多家庭产品中使用的材料的绿色替代。为了研究利用生物来源材料合成新型聚合物的适用性，目前石油原料材料在这一领域中的地位大大黯然失色。学生的目标是通过创造出与学术界和工业界目前可用的材料同等或更好的替代材料的方法，为弥合这一差距做出贡献。3.降低整个材料生产过程的整体能耗。学生将通过设计更环保的反应条件(溶剂等)来实现这一点。通过使用前面讨论的新型聚合物合成来赋予合成的新材料可持续的功能，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，并公正地了解科学家在确定如何将材料归类为“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。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。优化研究小组内开发的新型聚合技术，以生产新的可持续材料，包括开发高质量生物衍生材料的新途径，以及赋予材料可降解的功能，以提供目前许多家用产品中存在的不环保材料的替代品3。利用对可持续性如何分类的理解，设计分析方法，以量化所述可持续性，并扩大这些测试认为成功的材料的合成。这种规模的扩大将使学生了解他们的材料生产对能源的需求，这是实验室规模综合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.