I work in a Composites Centre. We mainly research polymer composites with carbon fibres. These are very stiff, strong but lightweight materials that used in aircraft and cars to reduce their weight and save fuel (as well as reducing the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the vehicle).
The aim of my research is to develop new polymers that have improved properties from ones that are already available. One aspect of my research is to improve the viscosity ranges of a polymer product. By decreasing the molecular weight distribution of the polymer you also decrease the viscosity range of the samples. This allows you to improve the product specification of the polymer products.
Hoping it will help towards the understanding of why cosmetics freeze at low temperatures, so that methods can be developed to prevent this in the future.
At the moment I’m working with enzymes, which are regularly used in industry for speeding up chemical reactions. They could also be used to make complex chemicals using relatively easy pathways – mix all your chemicals together, add enzymes, leave them for a few days and come back to collect your product.
Problem is that enzyme scan be hard to handle, so what we’re proposing is making a material purely out of enzyme that could e readily handled, and added or removed from solution. So if we crack this we’d be improving on previous forms of enzyme reactions.
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