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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SUPRABARRIER (SUPRAmolecular polyolefins as oxygen BARRIER materials)

Teaser

Summary

Addressed problem: The production of the next generation of oxygen-barrier polyolefin materials capable of meeting the current and future demands of society in a sustainable manner will require both new technologies and highly trained scientists. Supramolecular chemistry provides a powerful approach to develop new materials with emerging properties, such as low permeability to oxygen, maintaining easy processing.
Importance for Society: Currently the world is using 28 million tons of plastics for food packaging and 6.8 million tons for healthcare applications including cosmetics, hygienic, packaging and components. At present, these polymers are used in multilayer films or metallized plastic films to decrease their oxygen permeability. These kind of packaging are expensive and present severe recycling problems. Packaging materials with high oxygen barrier are necessary to prevent food decomposition and consequently wastage. Besides its environmental cost, food wastage represents also a loss of economic value. Based on 2009 producer prices on a global scale, the economic cost of the overall amount of food wastage in year 2007 was about 750 billion USD.
Overall objectives: the developed solutions, namely the introduction of H-bonding units and sol-gel coating, ehnanced the oxygen barrier properties of polyolefins in presence of high humidity content. As further outcome, the development of new reversible cross-links for polyolefins allowed the generation of new polyolifin vitrimers, i.e. polyolefins which are thermoplastic in the melt and thermoset in the solid state. Moreover, the industrially relevant reactive extrusion process for the preparation of these materials has been implemented.
At the educational level, both PhD students completed their PhD tenure and their research activity was positively evaluated by external reviewers.

Work performed

Both the ESRs completed the training programme.
The extensive and sophisticated training offered in SUPRABARRIER allowed the scientific and professional growth of the two enrolled ESRs. The interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the project, the monthly skype meetings, the frequent brain storming sessions, the close collaborations with the colleagues at UNIPR and SABIC gave natural openness to collaboration, determination to solve problems and ability to think beyond traditional research and national boundaries to the fellows. During the development of the project, the ESRs acquired a plethora of scientific and personal skills that will help them in their future careers. During the project development, the two PIs decided to extend the training programme of the two ESRs since more competences to be acquired were identified. Moreover, for the complete autonomy in performing the experiments needed for the implementation of the project, the participation of the two students to training courses to learn the use of scientific instruments (e.g. NMRs, DSC, TGA, Rheometer, etc.) was strongly encouraged. The international congresses, lectures and seminars attended by the fellows exposed them to different research areas and gave the opportunity to effectively communicate with colleagues from different backgrounds and settings, and to expand their networking which is a great advantage for their subsequent professional development. The external secondments in different labs (TU/Eindhoven, University of Cambridge, SABIC Technology Center Bangalore India) gave another dimension to the training of the students, both on research and human relationships aspects. The presence of SABIC as beneficiary helped the students to develop an important industrial network (customer interactions, involvement with different SABIC sites) which will help them in their future. The ample training in complementary skills like communicating with the scientific community and with the general public, and writing grant, proposal and scientific articles completed the professional preparation of the two ESRs.
The importance and validity of the achieved results are testified by the production of six scientific papers (2 published; one currently under revision and three under submission) and three patents. The evaluations of the PhD theses by external academic experts were very positive for both the students. In particular, the novelty and the application potential of both the theses were appreciated.

During the project new functionalized polyolefins were designed, prepared, characterised and tested. These materials presented a significant increase in oxygen barrier properties with respect to pristine polymers. The introduction of reversible cross-linking units produced polyolefin vitrimers have ehnanched mechanical properties. All these materials can be produced industrially via reactive extrusion process.

Final results

The importance and validity of the achieved results are testified by the production of six scientific papers (2 published; one currently under revision and three under submission) and three patents. The evaluations of the PhD theses by external academic experts were very positive for both the students. In particular, the novelty and the application potential of both the theses were appreciated. the reactive extrusion process turned out to be an industrial feasible solution to prepare and process these new materials.