Techniques and Instrumentation for Combinatorial and High‐Throughput Polymer Research: Recent Developments

Abstract

Summary: Emerging from the field of biochemistry and pharmaceutical research, combinatorial and high‐throughput synthesis and screening methodologies are rapidly being adopted in polymer and materials research. Alternative solutions to cost intensive custom‐made synthetic robot systems have become commercially available and further accelerate this field of research not just in industry, but also in an academic environment. High‐throughput analysis, materials characterization, and testing (surface energy, hardness, wettability, crystallinity etc.) are key techniques and require suitable instrumentation. Here we present a short overview of recent developments of robotic synthesizers and analytical equipment extending the review from January 2003.A picture of the Accelerator™PXT100 which allows up to forty individual reactions to be performed in parallel in various modes.magnified imageA picture of the Accelerator™PXT100 which allows up to forty individual reactions to be performed in parallel in various modes.

Reversible Addition-Fragmentation Chain Transfer Polymerization on different Synthesizer Platforms

“…Polymerizations were performed on a Chemspeed ASW2000 automated synthesizer [16,17], a Chemspeed Accelerator TM SLT100 [18] and a Chemspeed Autoplant A100 [18,19]. The Chemspeed Accelerator TM SLT100 and Chemspeed ASW2000 were equipped with a reactor block consisting of 16 reaction vessels of 13 mL.…”

Ability of nitrones of various structures to control the radical polymerization of styrene mediated by in situ formed nitroxides

“…Part of this study is based on high-throughput experimentation which is steadily more extensively used in the polymer field [43][44]. Hawker et al took advantage of this type of experimentation for testing a library of alkoxyamines in NMP [45].…”

Combinatorial and High‐Throughput Methods in Macromolecular Materials Research and Development

“…[94] Surface properties of polymer libraries are readily measured by determining the static contact angle of test fluids on polymer surfaces and several automated systems have been described. [27,69,95,96] Thaburet et al determined the wettability of polymer libraries by measuring the spread of droplets of water using automated image analysis. [97] Methods for determining polymer properties using gradient samples have also been explored.…”