Instrumentation for combinatorial and High-throughput polymer research : part I

Starting in biochemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry, combinatorial methods, automated synthesis and high-throughput characterization are being further developed for organic synthesis and polymer research. The development is strongly driven by the achievements in biochemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry and the need to minimize the time-to-market for novel polymeric products. The success of high-throughput methodologies in polymer science is partially limited by the hardware (synthesizers, workstations, robots, online-characterization instruments, etc.) and software commercially available. A short overview of commercially available equipment for polymer research is provided in this Review. Part one is focusing on synthesizers, part two will present instruments for cleaning and characterization of polymers as well as software.