Grant: Special Research Opportunity Program - Inter-American Collaboration in Materials Research

This project will involve the collaboration between two universities in Canada (Waterloo and McGill), one university in Brazil (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, UFRGS), and the leading polyolefin characterization company Polymer Char (Valencia, Spain) to design new polyolefins using metallocene catalysts supported on novel inorganic carriers. The project is synergistic because each researcher will bring a different expertise to the research team; it is also integrated because our ultimate objective, the synthesis of polyolefins with enhanced properties, can only be obtained through the integration of four fields of knowledge: catalyst synthesis and supporting, catalysts characterization, polymerization engineering, and polyolefin characterization Polyolefins are the most important large-volume plastics today and can be found in several different applications, ranging from plastic bags, household items and appliances, automotive parts and medical applications. In addition to their relatively low cost, their impact in the environment is relatively low, since they are composed of only carbon and hydrogen atoms, their production processes do not involve the use of hazardous solvents (in fact, several process do not use solvent at all), and they are readily recyclable and reused. Polyolefins can also be made with monomers obtained from renewable sources, such as sugar-cane. Because of these advantages, there is a current push towards the production of polyolefins with improved properties to compete with more expensive differentiated-commodity and specialty polymers, an effort in which this project intends to embark. Canada is a producer (Nova Chemicals, Imperial Oil, and Dow Chemical) and a main user of polyolefins and will certainly benefit from progress in this area of research.