Major industrial polymers


major industrial polymers, chemical compounds used in the manufacture of synthetic industrial materials.

In the commercial production of plastics, elastomers, man-made fibres, adhesives, and surface coatings, a tremendous variety of polymers are used. There are many ways to classify these compounds. In the article industrial polymers, chemistry of, polymers are categorized according to whether they are formed through chain-growth or step-growth reactions. In plastic (thermoplastic and thermosetting resins), polymers are divided between those that are soluble in selective solvents and can be reversibly softened by heat (thermoplastics) and those that form three-dimensional networks which are not soluble and cannot be softened by heat without decomposition (thermosets). In the article man-made fibre, fibres are classified as either made from modified natural polymers or made from entirely synthetic polymers.

In this article, the major commercially employed polymers are divided by the composition of their “backbones,” the chains of linked repeating units that make up the macromolecules. Classified according to composition, industrial polymers are either carbon-chain polymers (also called vinyls) or heterochain polymers (also called noncarbon-chain, or nonvinyls). In carbon-chain polymers, as the name implies, the backbones are composed of linkages between carbon atoms; in heterochain polymers a number of other elements are linked together in the backbones, including oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and silicon.

Carbon-chain polymers

Polyolefins and related polymers

By far the most important industrial polymers (for example, virtually all the commodity plastics) are polymerized olefins. Olefins are hydrocarbons (compounds containing hydrogen [H] and carbon [C]) whose molecules contain a pair of carbon atoms linked together by a double bond. Most often derived from natural gas or from low-molecular-weight constituents of petroleum, they include ethylene, propylene, and butene (butylene).

Olefin molecules are commonly represented by the chemical formula CH2=CHR, with R representing an atom or pendant molecular group of varying composition. As the repeating unit of a polymeric molecule, their chemical structure can be represented as:

The composition and structure of R determines which of the huge array of possible properties will be demonstrated by the polymer.

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