Research Interests
Having topped the production volume chart overlooking all other polymer families for more than half a century, polyolefins (PE, PP, etc.) are still growing in demand at a speed that is comparable to that of the most hailed environmentally benign bio-related polymers. This is because their area of application has kept expanding with little or no infringement from other polymers, thanks to their extremely high performance/cost ratio. Appreciating the strong vitality and being confident with the future of polyolefins, we are interested in exercising state-of-the-art polymer chemistry on polyolefins, aiming to further promote their performance while maintaining low cost, so as to additionally boost their cost-effectiveness. Generally, we pursue new, efficient, and industry-friendly chemistries that will result in either new polyolefins with unprecedented performances or new processes that surpass the existing industrial ones in controllability and/or simplicity. More specifically, we are
i) Exploiting the latest, most advanced Zielger-Natta and metallocene (and other single site family) catalysis to the end of catalyzed polyolefin alloys of much extendable envelops of components structures and compositions and hence broadly attainable properties, with the ability to control the alloys phase morphology.
ii) Developing an unprecedented "catalyzed polyolefin nanocomposites" technology that is broadly fitted to polyolefins of the most useful types (especially PP and PP copolymers) and applicable in industrial polymerization processes, which is expected to impact on polyolfin industry by ushering in a new class of high-performance/functional polyolefin resins with integrated reinforcing/functional nano particles.
iii) Fabricating new polyolefin architectures based on reactive polyolefins to explore the performance limits and new applications of polyolefins.