Specialty Monomers and Polymers Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 5.189.203.111 on 11/20/18. For personal use only.
Preface This book is a compendium of refereed papers based on invited talks presented at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Symposium on Specialty Monomers and Their Polymers. Specialty monomers are inherently different from commodity monomers, and it is these differences that result in new and important polymer properties. The most versatile feature of specialty monomers and polymers is their built-in functionality. This functionality offers significant opportunity to customize the design of polymers to meet specific performance, physical, and chemical properties. These properties are needed for many of today's hi-tech applications and cannot be easily obtained with more common commodity monomers and polymers. Specialty polymers have emerged as an important class of materials because they offer flexibility, both at the molecular and bulk levels, to optimize physical and chemical properties for medical and industrial applications. Because the structure of synthetic specialty polymers can be easily controlled and measured, they are frequently used to model the more complex natural polymers. Using well defined model compounds facilitates significant advancements in our understanding of fundamental properties. Increased understanding of materials issues will expedite the development of "smart polymers" that have unique, tunable, and responsive properties. Developing "smart polymers" requires a highly multidisciplinary approach, the progress of which depends on active collaboration from diverse groups, including chemists, biologists, physicians, physicists, material scientists, and engineers. Considering that interest in specialty polymers and "smart polymers" is growing worldwide and considering its multidisciplinary nature, a need exists for a comprehensive volume that covers important current developments in this field. This book is intended to fill such a void by providing broad coverage of recent work by leading international scientists in their respective areas. The book is comprehensive in scope, covering and providing the state of the art in topics ranging from polymer synthesis, to materials, to applications. We intend that this book will be of great value to researchers entering the area as well as a valuable reference book for researchers of varied backgrounds. We acknowledge the overwhelmingly positive response from the specialty polymers community. The breadth of participation in the symposium is due in part to the support from a number of organizations. In particular, we thank the ACS Division of Polymer Chemistry, Inc.; the Lubrizol Corporation; and ACS for their financial support. We are truly indebted to the numerous authors for their timely effort and to the referees for their critical evaluation of the manuscripts. KATHLEEN O . H A V E L K A
The Lubrizol Corporation 29400 Lakeland Boulevard Wickliffe, OH 44092-2298 CHARLES L. MCCORMICK
Department of Polymer Science University of Southern Mississippi Hattiesburg, MS 39046-0076
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