1998 Volume 26 Issue 4 Pages 191-197
The 1998 SRJ award winner has concisely reviewed his achievements in both scientific and administrative fields which brought him the great honor. Some brief introductions have been made on a series of simultaneous and/or sequential chemical reactions occurred in binary blend systems which made them to be of high quality or more functional. First, a series of poly (organo aloxane)s were synthesized and solution-blended with polyacrylonitril. The dry spun fibers prepared from the blends of various compositions were subjected to the pyrolysis around 1000°C. The high temperature sintering reaction made the fiber electrically conductive, because the poly (organo aloxane) converted into alumina ceramics while fine continuous conductive carbon phases were generated as a result of the thermal decomposition of distributing polyacrylonitril components. Then in the second part, the role of chain-extender in developing high performance blends has been described: Blends consisted of a thermotropic liquid-crystalline polyarylate (LCP) and a flexible polyester were chemically linked with a bis-oxazoline to give a variety of block copolymers and then were cast into thin films. A dynamic mechanical test revealed that the chemical bonding between both component polymers has significantly been effective to improve the mechanical properties of the resultant films. In the third topic, the polyblending technique has progressively been applied to the environmental protection: It was found that, when immersed in aqueous media, the decomposition rate of polyamide blended with a small amount of polymer having ester linkages was much higher than that of Nylon 6 itself. Analytical studies with GPC, NMR, IR, visible and UV spectroscopes revealed that the carboxylic acids generated by the hydrolysis of ester-linkages might be responsible to the enhancement. By these examples, the author has intended to demonstrate that the introduction of chemical reactivity to polymer blends has possibly led to a development of new polymeric materials with superior function or performance. Finally a brief description has been made on his efforts as the editor of the Journal of SRJ from 1991 to 1997.
