Polymer Science and Technology

From the Book: PREFACE: At least dozens of good introductory textbooks on polymer science and engineering are now available. Why then has yet another book been written? The decision was based on my belief that none of the available texts fully addresses the needs of students in chemical engineering. It is not that chemical engineers are a rare breed, but rather that they have special training in areas of thermodynamics and transport phenomena that is seldom challenged by texts designed primarily for students of chemistry or materials science. This has been a frustration of mine and of many of my students for the past 15 years during which I have taught an introductory course, Polymer Technology, to some 350 chemical engineering seniors. In response to this perceived need, I had written nine review articles that appeared in the SPE publication Plastics Engineering from 1982 to 1984. These served as hard copy for my students to supplement their classroom notes but fell short of a complete solution. In writing this text, it was my objective to first provide the basic building blocks of polymer science and engineering by coverage of fundamental polymer chemistry and materials topics given in Chapters 1 through 7. As a supplement to the traditional coverage of polymer thermodynamics, extensive discussion of phase equilibria, equation-of- state theories, and UNIFAC has been included in Chapter 3. Coverage of rheology, including the use of constitutive equations and the modeling of simple flow geometries, and the fundamentals of polymer processing operations are given in Chapter 11. Finally, I wanted to provide information on the exciting new materialsnowavailable and the emerging areas of technological growth that could motivate a new generation of scientists and engineers. For this reason, engineering and specialty polymers are surveyed in Chapter 10 and important new applications for polymers in separations (membrane separations), electronics (conducting polymers), biotechnology (controlled drug release), and other specialized areas of engineering are given in Chapter 12. In all, this has been an ambitious undertaking and I hope that I have succeeded in at least some of these goals. Although the intended audience for this text is advanced undergraduates and graduate students in chemical engineering, the coverage of polymer science fundamentals (Chapters 1 through 7) should be suitable for a semester course in a materials science or chemistry curriculum. Chapters 8 through 10 intended as survey chapters of the principal categories of polymers commodity thermoplastics and fibers, network polymers (elastomers and thermosets), and engineering and specialty polymers may be included to supplement and reinforce the material presented in the chapters on fundamentals and should serve as a useful reference source for the practicing scientist or engineer in the plastics industry.