The world of polymer materials : discovering synthetic macromolecules

Organic polymers are very much a part of our everyday lives, from the simplest and most common objects to the most sophisticated. The aim of the seminar was not to describe the highly varied properties of these materials, but to give an overview of the synthetic methods by which they can be obtained. The two main routes are polycondensation/polyaddition and chain polymerization. Among the latter, radical polymerization is particularly widely used, both on an industrial scale and in academic laboratories, where, since 1993, it has been the focus of intense work on its controlled aspects, sometimes (but abusively) considered as "living". These new polymerization methods make it possible to match the simplicity of operating conditions with the quality of the macromolecular structures accessible. For example, block copolymers can be produced with a very wide variety of monomers, enabling incompatible block architectures to be targeted and phase separations to be induced, either in a solid medium or in the presence of a selective solvent. The second part of the seminar focused on the latter point, with the presentation of a recent method for obtaining nano-objects (spheres, fibers or vesicles) composed of self-assembled amphiphilic copolymers, a method which combines advances in controlled radical polymerization with the polymerization process in a dispersed aqueous medium.