Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

As the world's largest produced polymers, polyolefins play an extremely important role in our industry and society. Despite their size and commodity nature, polyolefins are the fastest-growing sector of the polymer industry and remain highly technology driven. Improving product quality and developing advanced polyolefin materials with controlled chain architectures and tailored materials properties are two of the most important directions in polyolefins research and development. This proposed research is aimed at developing a novel class of value-added advanced polyolefins of unprecedented chain architectures. New polymerization strategies and catalyst technologies will be developed and employed for the synthesis of these polymers. If successful, these high-performance polymers can find value-added speciality applications in various industries, for example, as lubricant viscosity modifer, processing aids, etc. The fundamental knowledge to be generated in this research will contribute significantly to the design and synthesis of polyolefin materials, and will provide the industry a key to new polyolefin products.