Photo-Rheometer for Soft Material Characterization

加拿大在能源、卫生、信息、通信和自然资源等战略创新领域都依赖于物质进步。软材料，特别是聚合物，为这些领域的许多新产品做出了贡献。对开发新型软材料至关重要的基础信息是了解它们的固态和熔融态变形特性。这种特性告诉研究人员一种新材料在使用中的表现，以及提供其结构的有价值的细节。所要求的仪器是流变仪，通过熔体变形来研究聚合物，由于这些材料无法溶解到溶剂中用于其他表征仪器，因此流变仪通常是研究这些材料的唯一手段。培训学生流变特性为他们提供了一种理解分子尺度细节的方法，并通过这些知识，他们可以深入了解如何获得性质的变化。要求所有高分子科学与工程技术领域的学生掌握流变学知识。像麦克马斯特这样的加拿大大学在历史上一直有很强的研究项目，专注于流变学，在过去的四十年里，这些研究项目培养了一些学生，这些学生后来成为我们行业的技术领导者，以及加拿大目前许多从事材料进步研究的教授。提供具有要求的UV/Vis固化附件的流变仪将允许申请人通过为我们地区提供能够进行光流变测量的独特仪器来探索新的研究领域。光流变仪结合了熔体变形分析和通过引发光敏反应物在仪器内生长或修饰聚合物的能力。加拿大学术界很少使用光流变仪，而且我们现有的基本流变仪装置太旧，无法增加紫外线固化附件。所要求的仪器是一种用户友好的设备，可作为光流变仪和标准流变仪，用于培养研究生和博士后在分子控制软材料的制备和表征。光度计将放置在化学工程系，供化学、化学工程、生物医学工程学院和其他院系的研究人员使用。

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.