Polymers have drawn a great attention from scientists in chemistry, physics, biological sciences, chemical engineering, materials science and other fields. Accompanied with the prosperous development of polymers, the structural variations, performance failure and the long-term stability have been significantly addressed for the polymers during their aging process. These concerns were aroused because of the complicated polymer aging process that involves the chain initiation, propagation, branching, and termination. Note that the polymers exhibited distinct features during the different aging process, accompanied with the generation of radicals, functional groups, intermediates or final products.
Under the instruction of Academician Duan Xue, Rui Tian and Chao Lu in the College of Chemistry, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, have developed a 3D visualization strategy to identify the early-stage aging for polymers, which realizes highly sensitive multi-path monitoring and lifetime prediction of polymer aging (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.,2023, 62, e202307573; ACS Cent. Sci., 2020, 6, 771; Green Chem., 2022, 24, 2423; Macromolecules, 2022, 55, 5840; Anal. Chem., 2021, 93, 10301; et al.). These researches have provided a new idea for polymer aging monitoring and a basis for the understanding of polymer aging mechanism.
These works have attracted attentions from researchers delicated to the polymers. Invited by the Prof. Joachim Heberle as an editor from Chemical Reviews, Rui Tian and Chao Lu have presented the characterization strategies for the aged polymers in the different stages from the initiated aging process of polymers to their end of the lifecycle for a structural and morphological evaluation (Scheme 1). They also presented the correlation between the structure and performances for the aged polymers, contributing to the lifetime prediction and material design in the future.
Scheme 1. Characterization techniques during polymer aging
This review article focuses on the characterization strategies that feature the structural variations in the different stages during the polymer aging evolution. The review covers the generally applied spectral analysis for the detection, providing both the qualitative and quantitative results. Moreover, imaging strategies, based on the fluorescence, Raman, mass spectroscopy, and electron microscopy et al., showed their great potentials in providing a direct, visualized, and spatiotemporal images for the aged polymers. It is much helpful for researchers to understand the variations for polymers based on these images. It is anticipated that this review article would be greatly helpful to the researchers that working on the polymer aging, providing guidelines to choose a proper strategy to acquire the features in the different stages for the polymers.
Information for the manuscript:
Title: Characterization Techniques of Polymer Aging: From Beginning to End
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.2c00750