Photoinduced Reactions Leading to Polymeric and Composite Materials

There is an urgent need for the use of milder reaction conditions in an effort to control the world’s rapidly increasing environmental pollution. The emergence of photochemical paths that can be tuned in energy and time through cleaner reactions is a desired strategy for the synthesis of polymeric and composite materials. Phototoinduced polymerization reactions use light as the energy source, have higher efficiency, require milder reaction conditions, and have lower or no volatile organic solvent when compared with conventional methods. Moreover, photoinduced techniques provide great spatiotemporal and intensity control over the polymerization, and therefore, have been widely used in various modern technologies including 3D printing, microelectronics, nanolithography, data storage, coating, and dental applications.

There are different types of photoinduced reactions leading to polymeric materials such as radical/ionic chain-growth and step-growth polymerizations and the scope of photoinduced reactions is expanding fast with the discovery of new photoinitiating systems. However, there still remain challenges that should be addressed. In this research topic, our goal is to have environmentally friendly reaction conditions, high monomer conversion, suitable molecular weight, and molecular weight distribution of the aimed polymeric and composite material in order to match the requirements of sustainable chemistry and the intended application. In addition to this, the synthesized polymeric and composite materials should be thoroughly characterized using different spectral, microscopic, and chromatographic techniques.

In this Research Topic, novel photoinitiating systems can be designed and used under mild reaction conditions for the synthesis of different polymeric and composite materials with the desired features. Areas for this Research Topic may include but are not limited to:

• Photoinduced radical polymerization
• Photoinduced cationic polymerization
• Photoinduced anionic polymerization
• Photoinduced nitroxide-mediated polymerization (PhotoNMP)
• Photoinduced reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer polymerization (PhotoRAFT)
• Photoinduced atom-transfer radical polymerization (PhotoATRP)
• Frontal photopolymerization

Keywords: Ionic polymerisation, Sustainable chemistry, Photopolymerisation, Radical polymerisation, Living polymerisation, polymeric and composite materials

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