New front opened for greener high-performance polymers

High-performance polymers used in top-of-the-line aircraft can be expensive and cost the earth thanks to their huge carbon footprint. But a US team has now found a way to produce fibre-reinforced polymer composites similar to those used in the aircraft industry using a tiny fraction of the energy by using an alternative curing technique. Frontal polymerisation was first discovered at the Institute of Chemical Physics in Russia in 1972, before being independently rediscovered in 1991 by John Pojman and colleagues at the University of Southern Mississippi in the US. Ideally, the monomer remains stable until heat activates polymerisation at a single point.