Tailor-Made Polymers Through Selective Modification

摘要

Despite being generally regarded as "mass materials" without a high degree of sophistication in public, plastics are revolutionizing our life with new innovations on a day-to-day basis. While stunning developments like self-healing polymers or high-performance nanocomposites are still in a basic phase of their development, recent years have seen "commodity" materials like polyolefins evolving into performance polymers with a variety of technically demanding applications. This has become possible through a selective modification of the material properties on all structural and productional levels: Catalyst and chain structure, copolymerisation and phase morphology, conventional and reactive compounding, processing and crystallinity. A state-of-art review and an outlook on future developments for polyolefins in general, but polypropylene in particular, is given.