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Modern Styrenic Polymers: Polystyrenes and Styrenic Copolymers

ISBN: 978-0-471-49752-3

March 2003

792 pages

Description
Styrenic polymers encompass a broad range of types from commodity plastics to engineering polymers. Early polystyrenes - whilst having many favourable attributes such as outstanding clarity, high gloss, ease of processability and low cost - suffered from brittleness and poor chemical resistance. Today there exists a variety of new polymers, copolymers and blends that enable styrenic polymers to be used in ever growing and more demanding applications. Styrenic polymers now find widespread use in areas from packaging materials right through to structural components for domestic and automotive applications.

This book serves as the first comprehensive reference to systematically cover the preparation, properties and applications of this important class of polymers. Major end-use consideration of styrenic polymers such as fracture properties, flammability and photodegradation are covered in detail. This book also describes the latest advances from new polymerization technologies to novel polymer architectures. The book is truly international in its scope, with 31 contributions from leading experts in North America, South America, Europe, Japan and Australia.

With over 15 chapters written by The Dow Chemical Company and some five chapters by BASF, this book provides an authoritative and comprehensive treatment by contemporary experts from the leading companies engaged in the commercial manufacture, research and development of styrenic polymers.

About the Author

Dr. John Scheirs has worked extensively with poly and related polyesters. His early work involved studying the UV stability of PET and poly-ethylene naphthalate - in France and later he was involved with studying various industrial problems involving polyesters, such as photodegradation, annealing, crystallization behaviour, embrittlement, degradation by aminolysis, differential scanning calorimetry analysis, environmental stress cracking, hydrolysis, nucleating agents, transesterification, injection moulding of recycled PET compounds, solid-state polycondensation, desiccant drying of PET and melt stabilization of PET. More recently in the period 1998-2000, he was the technical manager for Coca-Cola Amatil's world-first PET reforming plant which converts post-consumer PET bottles into high-grade, high IV palletized PET for direct reuse in new bottles and injection and sheet moulding applications. John Scheirs is now the principal consultant with ExcelPlas Polymer Technology where he specializes in polymer recycling chemistry, formulation, processing and testing.

Duane Priddy is the editor of Modern Styrenic Polymers: Polystyrenes and Styrenic Copolymers, published by Wiley.