• Question: How advanced do you think polymers are going to get?

    Asked by PU to Anne, Arthur, Rose, Ruhina, Thomas on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Anne Canning

      Anne Canning answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      Polymers are already quite advanced and are used in many different everyday objects such as clothes, plastics, rubbers and are essential to so many technologies. There are so many different polymers that you can make by changing the chemistry of them, that I think this is a very difficult question to answer! Recently I read an article about a plane wing that had a chemical in, if the plane wing began forming any cracks, the chemical would be released, would polymerise and fill in the crack!

    • Photo: Ruhina Miller

      Ruhina Miller answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      There’s always new things to be discovered and I’m sure there will be advances in polymers in the same way there are in other fields, but as to how much progress will be made, it relies on making the material and testing it out to find new and better uses for it 🙂

    • Photo: Arthur Wilkinson

      Arthur Wilkinson answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      I think that polymers are going to be very advanced. One of the best examples of this at the moment is the “plastic blood” made at the University of Sheffield. Some of my colleagues talk about spraying a polymer onto a surface (such as clothing) and it separates to form an electronic device – this some time in the future but it’s possible.

    • Photo: Rose Simnett

      Rose Simnett answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I agree with everyone here, polymers are fantastic materials with such a broad range of properties and applications. Polymeric materials will be used lots in the future from medical applications like Arthur has said to things like robots. It is a very exciting area to be working in!

    • Photo: Thomas Farrugia

      Thomas Farrugia answered on 21 Jun 2015:

      Hoi PU – I reckon it depends on how many problems we need to solve and their nature. We’re already at the point where we can tune material properties of the polymers, and are already building in some stimuli responses (e.g heating a polymer may cause it to shrink, or placing it in acidic solutions may cause it to swell and release a neutralizing substance) so in that regard the sky is the limit.

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