Polymer-Solvent Molecular Compounds

Crystallisable polymers represent a large share of the polymers used for manufacturing a wide variety of objects, and consequently have received continuous attention from scientists these past 60 years. Molecular compounds from crystallisable polymers, particularly from synthetic polymers, are receiving growing interest due to their potential application in the making of new materials such as multiporous membranes capable of capturing large particles as well as small pollutant molecules. Polymer-Solvent Molecular Compounds gives a detailed description of these promising systems. The first chapter is devoted to the presentation of important investigational techniques and some theoretical approaches. The second chapter is devoted to biopolymers, the first polymers known to produce molecular compounds, chiefly with water. The third chapter deals with synthetic polymers where compound formation is either due to hydrogen-bonding or to electrostatic interactions. The fourth chapter describes intercalates and clathrates systems for which compound formation is mainly due to a molecular recognition process.

Prof. Jean-Michel GUENET is “Directeur de Recherche CNRS» at Institut Charles Sadron (Strasbourg, France), a CNRS-owned laboratory associated with the Université Louis Pasteur. He was born in 1951 in Blanc-Mesnil, which is a suburb of Paris (France). He graduated in 1974 from Paris XIII University as a Material Science Engineer and obtained a PhD degree in 1980 at Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg. He was a post-doctoral fellow for one year at Bristol University (UK) with Pr. A. Keller on a grant from the Royal Society. He has been a visiting scientist at NIST with Prof. G.B. McKenna (Gaithersburg, USA) in 1985, a visiting-professor at Université de Mons-Hainaut (Belgium) with Prof. M. Dosière from 1995 to 2004, and an invited professor at Shizuoka University (Japan) with Prof. H. Itagaki in 2002. Apart from being the author of about 150 papers, he has also written a monograph on thermoreversible gels published by Academic Press in 1992 (Thermoreversible gelation of polymers and biopolymers). In 1990, he has been awarded the Dillon Medal of the American Physical Society for his work on polymer gels. He was the first non-american to receive this award. He is also the founder of a series of conferences entitled “Polymer-solvent Complexes and Intercalates”.