Polymer product engineering: an emerging discipline of chemical engineering for high performance polymer materials

Chemical product engineering represents an emerging discipline rooted to chemical engineering. Its core content of research lies in precision production of chemical structures. Polymer products contain complex structures at multiple scales. Polymerization processes, to a large extent, determine polymer chain microstructures and morphologies. In the recent years, we developed various polymerization processes and produced polymers having precisely designed chain microstructures. These polymer products showed high performances and superior material properties in targeted applications. Our methodology employs kinetic modeling combined with reactor technologies, based on extensive mechanistic research on polymerization mechanisms. In controlled/living radical(co)polymeri-zation, we developed a novel model-based computer-programed semi-batch copolymerization technology that allows unprecedented precise control over end-to-end copolymer composition of individual chains. In catalytic polymerization of olefins, we developed a reactor technology for in-situ production of polyolefin alloys. This paper provides a brief summary of the recent advances in the polymer product engineering researches.