Polymer and their manufacture play a very important part in our daily lives and the technologies that we use. This course will leads the student to an in-depth understanding of the chemistry and physics of polymers via interactive lectures, tutorials as well as hands on lab classes. We will cover fundamental polymer chemistry, i.e. polycondensations, polyadditions, ionic polymerizations and free radical polymerization, and learn what strategies are at our disposal to generate simple and complex macromolecular architectures including statistical and block copolymers as well as star and comb structures. In addition, the student will learn how knowledge of polymerization kinetics allows for a prediction of polymer molecular weight distributions. The polymer physics segment of the course will allow the student to develop an understanding of the physical properties of polymers in relation to their chemical structure.
This course replaces POLY3011, POLY3012.
Textbook: Odian, G, Principles of Polymerization, 3rd Ed., Wiley.