Combinatorial Compounding

Abstract

The development of novel polymer formulations is a complex as well as time and resource consuming task. To address this problem, a production-size twin-screw extruder with four additive feeding units was coupled with a flat film extrusion line to yield an integrated system for combinatorial compounding (CC) and high throughput screening (HTS). This allows the rapid synthesis of polymer formulations of varying compositions. When coupled to fast characterisation equipment, this set-up will allow the discovery of polymer formulations in a high-throughput manner. A number of possible rapid materials tests for screening purposes are discussed.

Polymer Informatics

“…Another significant driver of change is the increasing use of combinatorial and high-throughput experimentation (HTE) in virtually all areas of polymer science, starting with synthesis and discovery [28][29][30][31][32][33][34], processing [35][36][37][38][39][40] as well as screening for chemical, physical and mechanical [41,42] properties. While HTE has been an integral and indispensable part of the pharmaceutical industry for a significant period of time, the materials science community has mainly persisted in using "onestep-at-a-time" experimental approaches.…”

Engineering Polymer Informatics: Towards the Computer‐Aided Design of Polymers

“…For these reasons, the rapid discovery, development, and optimisation of (novel) polymeric entities is of high importance as has been evidenced by the development of high‐throughput and combinatorial methods both in polymer synthesis and screening9–12 as well as polymer processing 13. One component that has been notably absent from the high‐throughput vision so far, is the use of informatics tools for the computer‐aided design of polymers and polymeric systems, although a number of attempts have been reported in the past 14–16.…”

Chemical Markup, XML and the World-Wide Web. 8. Polymer Markup Language

“…The world production of polymers is consistently increasing and novel application areas are constantly being developed. Furthermore, the advent of high-throughput experimentation and parallelization, − as well as novel synthesis , and processing approaches, has triggered a profound change in the way polymer science is being carried out. The increasing speed with which new polymers can be synthesized and screened almost automatically generates the need for sophisticated informatics tools to manage the vast amounts of data that can now be produced and to develop “design-rules” (structure−property relationships) for polymers.…”