Chemistry Commons^™

Novel Thermoplastic Elastomers Based On Benzofulvene: Synthesis And Mechanical Properties, Weiyu Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) are of great importance both academically and technologically. Currently TPEs are the predominated form of styrene-diene copolymers. However, these styrenic TPEs have serious limitations in applications, especially at higher temperature, because of their low upper service temperature (UST). The work described in this dissertation aimed to developing thermoplastic elastomers with a higher UST and lower cost.

In order to develop TPEs with a higher UST, we employed benzofulvene, an anionically polymerizable monomer in hydrocarbon solvent at room temperature, as the glassy block and copolymerized it with isoprene to prepare polybenzofulvene-polyisoprene-polybenzofulvene (FIF) triblock copolymers. Among all triblock copolymers …

Tungsten Carbide/Carbon Electrode Material Synthesized By Block Copolymer Template Method, Xiao-Ling Lang, Ye-Kun Jiang, Mei-Qin Shi, Ling-Zhi Kang, Chun-An Ma

Journal of Electrochemistry

At present, one of the major hurdles for commercialization of system with direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) is still the requirement of a significant amount of platinum (Pt) catalyst to achieve an acceptable power density. Pt and Pt-based metals are expensive due to limited supplies. In order to find the catalyst alternative to the Pt metal, we selected tungsten carbide (WC) and its composites as the study object. We synthesized WC with carbon materials as the suitable support to modify the electronic structure and to increase the specific surface area of WC. In this study, tungsten carbide/carbon (WC/C) was prepared …