Model-based product engineering: How can we describe application properties from polymer structure?

Polymers play a major role in fulfilling people’s needs in many fields such as e.g. heat insulation in eco-efficient buildings, formulations in care products, high performance materials for wind rotor blades and plastics for lightweight automotive. Development of new polymer solutions is often established via screening of newly synthesized polymer structures from chemists’ intuition. However, in the past, the synthesized structures often did not match totally to specific application needs. Moreover, the scale-up from synthesis in lab scale to an industrial production process is difficult if the requirements of the polymer structure are not exactly known. Due to the increasing complexity of new products, a new work flow starting with defining the application properties is more desirable. Based on the needed application properties, the necessary polymer structures and morphologies are identified. Subsequently, the right process to create tailor made polymer structures and morphologies using the best fitting polymer chemistry can be designed. While such a workflow requires the generation of a structure-property relationship for the target application, it increases the probability of success to match a specific application demand. The pure work flow for efficient development of new system solutions initiated by structure property relationships is continuously rising, but far from being established. Meanwhile there are examples where parts of the workflow are already successfully applied for new products and improved processes. In the presentation, examples for the new approach will be shown along the whole development process from definition of application needs to the design of polymer production processes