Polymer Engineering

At Monash:

A team of Monash engineers has recently received national recognition for their research investigating how polymers can be used as electro-catalysts.  Such polymers could one day replace expensive rare metal catalysts such as platinum, which could one day lead the way to dramatically cheaper fuel cells.

Monash also holds the record for electrical conductivity through a polymer.  In fact, our researchers believe that there are now very few engineering applications in which polymers cannot compete with metals. Polymer engineering is set to be one of the most important engineering challenges of the future.

Other exciting areas include:

• Synthesis, characterisation, manipulation and testing of thermosetting polymers, liquid crystalline polymers, electrically conducting polymers and dendritic polymers
• Polymer structures, morphology and deformation, and polymeric nano-composites
• Functional polymer systems with potential applications in energy storage
• Experimental determination of extensional viscometry of polymer solutions
• Building biodegradable polymeric scaffolds to support human stem cell growth
• Synchrotron studies of injection moulded plastics
• Advanced statistical mechanical simulation of polymer solutions using Brownian dynamics
• Coarse-grained models for hydrodynamic and other long-range interactions in suspensions of particles and polymer solutions
• Gas liquid reactions and the effect of mass transfer on chemical reactions, especially at high pressures and temperatures in organic oxidations.
• Polymer rheology involving the measurement of extensional viscosity of polymer solutions and analysis of the behaviour of macromolecules in these flow fields.