Polymer Colloids

This text introduces the beginner to the field with a solid development of the fundamentals, without getting bogged down in details. It provides an insight that can only be found from the author's 40+ years of experience

Academic and industrial research around polymer-based colloids is huge, driven both by the development of mature technologies, e.g. latexes for coatings, as well as the advancement of new materials and applications, such as building blocks for 2D/3D structures and medicine. Edited by two world-renowned leaders in polymer science and engineering, this is a fundamental text for the field. Based on a specialised course by the editors, this book provides the reader with an invaluable single source of reference. The first section describes formation, explaining basic properties of emulsions and dispersion polymerization, microfluidic approaches to produce polymer-based colloids and formation via directed self-assembly. The next section details characterisation methodologies from microscopy and small angle scattering, to surface science and simulations. The final chapters close with applications, including Pickering emulsions and molecular engineering for materials development. A comprehensive guide to polymer colloids, with contributions by leaders in their respective areas, this book is a must-have for researchers and practitioners working across polymers, soft matter and chemical and molecular engineering.

The growth of interest in the subject of Polymer Colloids over the last twenty five years or so has been very large resulting now in major international conferences on an annual basis and many national ones as well. The interest stems not only from the wide range of applications of these materials but also from a curiosity as to the mechanism of formation and their growing use as model particles to investigate fundamental aspects of physics and chemistry. In July 1988 a NATO Advanced Study Institute was held in Strasbourg, France, at the Centre St. Thomas. As an educational introduction to this I nstitute a series of eight lectures was given to cover the fundamental aspects of the subject. These eight lectures have now been compiled into an Introductory Text covering, emulsion poly merization, dispersion polymerization, inverse emulsion polymerization, the morphology of copolymer latices, the colloidal properties of latices, characterization methods and rheology. It is hoped that these will serve a wide audience, undergraduates, graduate-students and research workers, both in industry and academe. The chapters all contain review material up to date at the time of publication. fhe 1988 NATO Advanced Study I nstitute was made possible by a grant from the NATO-AS I programme and the following companies: BASF, Ludwigshafen, West Germany The Dow Chemical Company, Michigan, USA Dow Chemical Rheinwerk GmbH, Rheinmunster, West Germany ICI PLC, Runcorn, England S. C. Johnson and Son Inc., Racine, USA NORSOLOR, Verneuil en Halatte, France Rhone Poulenc, Aubervilliers, France.

Colloid Science is an ancient art. Unfortunately many scientists still regard it as such~ We hope that this book will dispel all such illusions by providing convincing evidence that a quiet renaissance has occurred. The New Colloid Science is based on rigorous, quantitative theory and works with extremely well de fined experimental systems. The former was first made possible by the advent of the Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) theory of the stability of lyophobic colloids in 1948. This is based on a consideration of the electrostatic interactions among colloidal par ticles bearing fixed charges in a medium containing moving counter ions. The Hamiltonian formulation of this model by Weiss, Mock, and Moon herein is a significant development in our theoretical pro gress. During about the same period we have advanced experimentally from poorly defined "glue-like" systems to monodisperse colloids, synthesized for the first time in 1955 when J. W. Vanderhoff and E. B. Bradford announced their polystyrene colloids with extremely narrow particle size distributions. Vanderhoff and his coworkers have now set another milestone by fully characterizing the surfaces of these systems, as described in this monograph. The revolution is snowballing. Krieger and his coworkers have shown that the opalescent colors exhibited by "deionized" monodis perse latexes are due to Bragg diffraction of these liquid-crystal systems, that they exhibit reversible "melting" and that they may serve as macroscopic models for order-disorder phenomena.

This volume is comprised of most of the papers presented at a symposium held in Miami Beach during the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in September, 1978. In a sense, it is a sequel to the first ACS symposium held on this topic and published under the title "Polymer Colloids" in 1971 by Plenum Press. That volume contained 12 papers, whereas "Polymer Colloids II" contains 33, an indication of the magnitude of the growth of the field in less than a decade. Increased sophistication probably best characterizes the changes which have taken place, especially in the realm of instru mentation. Ten years ago techniques such as quasielastic light scattering, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS - also known as ESCA), ion scattering spectroscopy (ISS), ultrasonic absorption spectroscopy and hydrodynamic exclusion chromatography (REC) were unavailable to the polymer colloid chemist. Recent advances in all of these methods are described in this volume. Although the book deals primarily with "synthetic latexes" or "emulsion polymers" as colloids, there are a number of papers which deal with their synthesis: particle nucleation in emulsion polymer ization, the synthesis of emulsifier-free polymer colloids using novel reagents, molecular weight distributions derived from the kinetics of emulsion polymerization, and anionically polymerized non-aqueous polymer colloids. The kinetics and thermodynamics of the swelling of latex particles by monomers is also dealt with here.

Future Directions In Polymer Colloids Hohamed S. EI-Aasser, and Robert H. Fitch (editors) It is appropriate that the first NATO-Advanced Research Workshop on "FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN POLYMER COLLOIDS" was held approximately fifty years after the first synthetic polymer latexes were made on a commercial scale during the mid-1930s. Since that time the field of what is now known as polymer colloids has been evolving rapidly, not only on the practical level, but also on the scientific and engineering levels. Billions of pounds of copolymers are manufactured annually by means of the emulsion polymerization process. "Commodity" polymers as well "specialty" polymers are prepared today for use in a wide variety of applications: synthetic rubber, floor coatings, paints, adhesives, binders for non-woven fabrics, high-impact polymers latex foam, additives for construction materials such as cement and concrete, and rheological modifiers. They are also used in numerous biomedical applications: such as diagnostic tests, immunoassays, biological cell-labeling, (identi fication and separation), and drug delivery systems. Small quantities of monodisperse polymer colloids are used as size calibration standards and find extensive use as model colloids to test theories in colloids surface and rheological studies. Advances have been made in our understanding of the mechanism and kinetics of the emulsion polymerization process as well as the stability of polymer colloids. Equal advances were made in engineering areas related to polymer colloids, e. g. modeling of batch, semi-continuous and continuous emulsion polymerization and copolymer ization processes.

Science and Technology of Polymer Colloids G. W. Poehlein, R. H. Ottewill, J. W. Goodwin (editors) Polymer colloids, more commonly known as latexes, are important in the manufacture of synthetic elastomers, commodity polymers, surface coatings, adhesive and numerous specialty products. The significant growth of the commercial production of polymer latexes during the past decade has been due to a number of factors. First, water-based systems, especially paints and coatings, avoid many of the environ mental problems associated with the solvent-based systems. Second, polymer colloid products can be custom designed to meet a wide range of application requirements. Third, large scale emulsion polymeri zation proceeds smoothly and controllably with a wide range of monomers to produce stable polymer colloids of high molecular weight Polymer colloids are also important in functional scientific studies This importance arises from the spherical shape of the particles, range of attainable particle diameters and the uniformity of their size distribution, and the possibility of controlling and character izing the particle surface. Polymer colloids are useful as size standards in microscopy and in instrument calibration, and as carriers in antibody-enzyme diagnosti, tests. As suspensions of uniform spherical particles, they are idea. experimental systems to test the series of colloidal phenomena as stability and coagulation, electric kinetic or rheological proper ties, and light scattering. In recent years, polymer colloids have received attention as models for many-body molecular phenomena, including the order-disorder transitions and the mechanics of crystalline phases.