This PhD opportunity will be in the McIntosh research group at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
Please contact Ruaraidh McIntosh ([Email Address Removed]) for further details.
Polymers play a vital role in our everyday lives but their production is heavily reliant on fossil fuels and their waste has had a significant, negative impact on the environment. With an obvious need to move away from using fossil fuels and begin harnessing our natural resources in a sustainable way, the reuse and recycling of plastic has become critically important.
Thermosets contain cross-links between the polymer chains that prevent the material softening when it is heated. This makes thermosets ideal choices for applications where heat resistance and mechanical strength are required but this also makes them almost impossible to recycle. These make up around 15% of global annual production therefore a thermoset plastic which is both recyclable and derived from a sustainable resource would be an important breakthrough.
This project aims to create reusable, recyclable, and sustainable thermosets by developing a metal complex which is capable of simultaneously catalysing two different polymerisation reactions.
We will explore the creation of a thermoset materials from renewable resources through tandem polymerisation reactions. Furthermore, by incorporating the cleavable groups within the polymer backbone we achieve an accessible method to break the internal crosslinking and recycle the material.
The aim would be to derive polymers that can ultimately be exploited commercially, therefore we will also explore the relationships between molecular structure and mechanical properties, and determine how the catalyst design influences the properties of these materials. This will include investigating their potential to be incorporated into thermoset composite materials, which will be beneficial for commercial exploitation.
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