The limitation on monomers is severe once you start looking at volumes. It's easy (and fun!) to come up with new monomers or ways of using unusual monomers. Super hard to get them at scale, at a cost that does not tank the product launch. I once had a very bright chemist advocating for a silane acrylate that they found in a catalog. I agreed it would do the job, but sent them off to get pricing before we went too far. Very crestfallen bright young chemist came back from purchasing.
The first moral of the story is make friends with purchasing/ supply chain. They can save you from the no-chance work and enable the merely bold.
The second moral of the story is that additives are often more cost-effective than monomers, and have impact at lower amounts.
Put another way, why invent a new polymer structure when you can formulate your way out of a problem. The same also goes in areas like medical devices, where there is a lot of regulatory oversight around new materials. Better to combine known materials than invent whole new chemical structures.
I always think of this when I see academic talks describing very intricate all-in-one polymers (that form micelles, covalently bind drugs that release at particular pHs, have fluorescent reporters, etc.).
I think with something like polyurethanes/ureas the opportunity to make something new usually is usually a more "permanent" solution than formulating in an additive.
Formulating in an additive definitely works in some instances and sometimes is the only way to make it work.
Could be as easy as incorporating a new trimer isocynate based off of IPDI or HDI. As for a brand-new polymer though, like you are describing. I'd rather bet on black at the casino.
It would depend on the application for sure. And it's not necessarily about additives, in my experience, but rather about systems of 2+ (commodity or at least commercial) polymers that can obviate the need for a single bespoke material.
Agreed. Once you know the cost structure your customer is willing to pay then you can start thinking about if that really expensive monomer provides enough value.
Hexamethylene diisocyanate is super-duper expensive, but there are certain specialty areas where it's a viable monomer. Same is true for dimers/trimers of isophorone diisocyanate.
This is also where marketing/sales needs to help too.
Another great article, thank you. I am curious: do you expect the (widely agreed-upon) list of commodity thermoplastics to change within your lifetime? Are people developing specialty polymers with the idea to one day supplant a commodity thermoplastic?
I could see PVC falling off (see that train derailiment in Ohio), but it's tough because it's so cheap and so good. Maybe crosslinked polyethylene takes its place?
Same with polystyrene. Everyone seems to absolutely abhor it and it doesn't get recycled. I'm not sure what you could replace it with, maybe PET or HDPE, but it would be expensive and the heat deflection temperature isn't there. Once again, it's the problem of it being really cheap and really good.
Maybe PHAs get their moment in single use plastic applications, but we need legit composting infrastructure, and we need composters who are willing to take it. Essentially, we need the packaging people and the composters to talk more because right now they are not. Last time I spoke to a composting guy (couple of weeks ago) many facilities were straight up banning compostable plastics or refusing to take it.
The limitation on monomers is severe once you start looking at volumes. It's easy (and fun!) to come up with new monomers or ways of using unusual monomers. Super hard to get them at scale, at a cost that does not tank the product launch. I once had a very bright chemist advocating for a silane acrylate that they found in a catalog. I agreed it would do the job, but sent them off to get pricing before we went too far. Very crestfallen bright young chemist came back from purchasing.
The first moral of the story is make friends with purchasing/ supply chain. They can save you from the no-chance work and enable the merely bold.
The second moral of the story is that additives are often more cost-effective than monomers, and have impact at lower amounts.
Put another way, why invent a new polymer structure when you can formulate your way out of a problem. The same also goes in areas like medical devices, where there is a lot of regulatory oversight around new materials. Better to combine known materials than invent whole new chemical structures.
I always think of this when I see academic talks describing very intricate all-in-one polymers (that form micelles, covalently bind drugs that release at particular pHs, have fluorescent reporters, etc.).
I think with something like polyurethanes/ureas the opportunity to make something new usually is usually a more "permanent" solution than formulating in an additive.
Formulating in an additive definitely works in some instances and sometimes is the only way to make it work.
Could be as easy as incorporating a new trimer isocynate based off of IPDI or HDI. As for a brand-new polymer though, like you are describing. I'd rather bet on black at the casino.
It would depend on the application for sure. And it's not necessarily about additives, in my experience, but rather about systems of 2+ (commodity or at least commercial) polymers that can obviate the need for a single bespoke material.
Agreed. Once you know the cost structure your customer is willing to pay then you can start thinking about if that really expensive monomer provides enough value.
Hexamethylene diisocyanate is super-duper expensive, but there are certain specialty areas where it's a viable monomer. Same is true for dimers/trimers of isophorone diisocyanate.
This is also where marketing/sales needs to help too.
Another great article, thank you. I am curious: do you expect the (widely agreed-upon) list of commodity thermoplastics to change within your lifetime? Are people developing specialty polymers with the idea to one day supplant a commodity thermoplastic?
I could see PVC falling off (see that train derailiment in Ohio), but it's tough because it's so cheap and so good. Maybe crosslinked polyethylene takes its place?
Same with polystyrene. Everyone seems to absolutely abhor it and it doesn't get recycled. I'm not sure what you could replace it with, maybe PET or HDPE, but it would be expensive and the heat deflection temperature isn't there. Once again, it's the problem of it being really cheap and really good.
Maybe PHAs get their moment in single use plastic applications, but we need legit composting infrastructure, and we need composters who are willing to take it. Essentially, we need the packaging people and the composters to talk more because right now they are not. Last time I spoke to a composting guy (couple of weeks ago) many facilities were straight up banning compostable plastics or refusing to take it.