Novel polymer architectures and their properties
The understanding of structure-property relationships of polymers is of immense importance, both in order to realize the full potential of polymeric materials, and also in order to appropriately and efficiently design and synthesize polymers for their target applications. Novel polymeric structures are of special interest as they can open up the door to new possibilities.
The polymer industry has been one of the largest growing industries in the world these past decades, and polymer architecture is of substantial interest there as it allows us to control certain properties of our polymeric materials. Polymer chemists have therefore been motivated to be creative in synthesizing interesting and novel polymer structures, such as star, bottlebrush, and cyclic polymers. With more efficient synthesis of these and other novel architectures, we are better able to tune the desired properties of our materials, giving us improved systems for most fields of industry and various applications, e.g. photonic crystals and drug delivery.
One of our main research projects involves the synthesis of novel polymeric architectures, in particular the combination of different architectural elements. We are excited to share with the scientific community more of our results once we are further along the way in this project. This project is funded by the Icelandic Research Fund 2021-23 (grant number #218163). Initial work on this project was funded by the Icelandic Student Innovation Fund the summer of 2019 (via grant number 195861-0091).
Polymer recycling
From 1950 to 2015, the compound annual growth rate of global plastics production was 8.4%, resulting in 380 megatons of resins and fibers being produced in 2015. However, the average global recycling rate of plastics is currently only about 18%, and between 1990 and 2014, the global non-fiber recycling rate increased only by 0.7% per year. Meanwhile, the amount of plastic waste that is discarded for landfill, and often ends up in the oceans, is becoming an increasing problem for our society and nature. There is therefore a definite need to improve our recycling approaches, making them more effective and cost-efficient so they become an increasingly attractive option for the industry.
Solvent-based plastics separation is not an entirely new concept, but it is still a vastly underutilized approach as discussed in a recent review from 2018. There remain certain technical challenges with this approach, especially when it comes to copolymers, that limit its use as well. This field offers opportunities for research to enhance our understanding of polymer solubilities, especially regarding the effect of size and architecture on polymer solubility, as well as studying the solubility in mixed plastics.
In 2020 we started exploring more how we might better use solvent-based recycling to separate and recycle plastics. Our research includes exploration on how we can separate different polymer sizes and architectures from a complex mixture of plastics solid waste. This project received funding from the Icelandic Student Innovation Fund the summer of 2020 (via grant number 207083-0091).
Chemical education research
Chemical education is one of Ben's passions and one of his core beliefs is that we should always strive to continuously improve ourselves in all areas. This includes teaching and our educational system. Along with other research, the group therefore seizes on the opportunities that arise to improve upon teaching approaches, lab exercises and other things that related to chemical education. We are currently involved in revamping the organic chemistry lab curriculum and hope to be able to develop some exciting new lab exercises as part of that process.
Smaller projects
Occassionally, smaller short-term pet projects arise. These are often convenient for shorter research projects, such as shorter master's thesis (< 60 ECTS) and undergraduate thesis projects. In the past these have included total synthesis of natural products and exploration of the regioselectivity of the Claisen rearrangement for very specific substrates. We hope to be able to share more of those results with the scientific community soon.