Abstract:
We need to re-design polymers to try to tackle sustainability concerns and also reduce the greenhouse gas emissions prevalent through their life cycle. The lecture will describe recent research from the Williams team in the development of polymerizations using renewable resources such as carbon dioxide and biomass. It will focus on how to improve the activity and selectivity of catalysts, using kinetic, spectroscopic and computational methods to investigate the polymerization mechanisms. The resulting oxygenated polymers can be tailored to show different properties and case studies will focus on improving the properties of plastics and using block polymers as binders for solid-state lithium-ion batteries.The end-life recycling of the polymers, by both re-processing and catalyzed depolymerizations, will be discussed.