Search

Biobased polymers are sustainable polymers produced from renewable resources such as biomass feedstocks instead of the industrial fossil resources such as petroleum and natural gases. This trend helps in creating an environmentally friendly chemical processing that is characterized by low carbon footprint emission to the globe which in turn will limit the increase of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration even after their incineration. Synthesis of polymeric materials from biobased resources also solves the problem of polymer waste recycling. This chapter covers a basic background on the origin and importance of biobased polyamides, different synthetic routes of their starting monomeric materials obtained from biomass feedstocks, and a brief summary of the physical and chemical properties and applications of some common aliphatic, semiaromatic and fully aromatic polyamides. This chapter ends with a recent published data on the growth of the global market of biobased polyamides to emphasize on the economic importance of this manufacturing trend.

The application of polymeric films as alarms for explosive materials is a critical issue these days as mandated by homeland security requirements. Amongst the multiple advantageous points of applying polymer films in this area is the fact that they are cheap material, so they can be applied on a broad scale for low cost. The basic idea of the current work is based on the fact that common explosives are electron deficient because of the existence of the nitro-groups in their chemical structures, and this causes their high affinities towards electron rich materials to form charge-transfer complex. Our endeavor is to trace any charge-transfer complex formation, which would definitely cause a recognizable change in their physical properties. These changes in the polymers' physical properties could be utilized as alerts for the existence of explosive materials, especially if such changes could be incorporated into sophisticated electronic circuits that would give strong for traces of explosives. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The magnetic tape industry applies a mixture of stearic acid/butylstearate as a lubricant mixture in their formulation. This lubricant system has several disadvantageous points since it enhances corrosion to the GMR head, due to the existence of the stearic acid free carboxylic group; also, it is not chemically bonded to the tape surface and can freely leave the tape surface in time, leading to inferior winding/unwinding performance of the tape. In this work, we pursue our challenging task for finding a better lubricant(s) to resolve the problems with the current commercial lubricant system. We also continue working with the hypothesized model test sample which imitates the features for the real magnetic tape surface. The goal of this series of work is to correlate between the chemical structures for the miscellaneous lubricants and their micro-tribological behavior at the interface between the sample and reference guide surfaces.