Synchrotron radiation (SR) provides highly brilliant light with tunable wavelength from hard X-ray to far infrared, on which scattering, spectroscopy and imaging techniques with high time and spatial resolutions have been developed for in situ study on biological system and materials like polymer. With examples on flow-induced crystallization of polymer, deformation of nanoparticle filler network in rubber composite and necking propagation in tensile stretch, current work attempts to demonstrate the advantages of in situ synchrotron radiation X-ray scattering, X-ray nano-CT and infrared imaging in the study of deformation-induced multi-scale structural evolutions of polymers. With time resolution up to sub-ms, synchrotron radiation is expected to play a great role in understanding non-equilibrium polymer physics under processing and service conditions, while high-throughput characterization platform based on synchrotron radiation opens the possibility to establish polymer Materials Genome database in processing parameter space within reasonable time, which can serve as the roadmap for industrial polymer processing and accelerate material innovation.

The interfacing study of biopolymer and supramolecular chemistry enables a better understanding of fundamental biochemical processes and the creating of new high-performance biomaterials. In this review, we introduced an " in vivo self-assembly” strategy which means in situ construction of functional self-assembled superstructures in specific physiological or pathological conditions in cell, tissue or animal levels that exhibit diverse biomedical effects. By using this strategy, unexpected phenomena and insights, e.g, assembly/aggregation induced retention (AIR) effect have been demonstrated where the self-assembled nanostructures showed extraordinary enhanced accumulation and retention of therapeutics in targeted sites.

The siliceous frustules of diatom algae contain complex proteins known as silaffins, which consist of a peptide chain with grafted polyamine chains. These polyamines contain twenty or more nitrogen atoms with trimethylene groups between the nitrogens. We synthesized a set of polymers containing grafted long-chain polyamine fragments by using acryloyl chloride (ACh) polymers and activated acrylic acid copolymers as the starting materials. The new polymers contained 0.05 mol%−3.2 mol% of polyamine chains, which corresponded to 0.06−3.56 mmol·g⁻¹ amine groups. The new amine-containing polymers formed complexes with short (19-21-mer) deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) strands, and these complexes penetrated into model yeast cells and A549 lung cancer cell. This study demonstrates the potential of these species based on long-chain polyamines to serve as novel gene delivery systems.

A series of zinc silylamido complexes based upon NNO tridentate enolic Schiff base framework have been synthesized and characterized. These complexes were tested for the ring opening polymerization of lactide and ε-caprolactone, exhibiting notably high activity at ambient temperature. The influence of imine bridge length and substituents of diketone over the course of polymerization was investigated in details. Remarkably, 4a was confirmed to be a rare example of exceedingly active and robust zinc catalysts, achieving major transformation of lactide under extremely low loading (0.025 mol%) within 18 min. The influence of various monomers as well as the polymerization mechanism have also been discussed.

A series of random terpolymers P2−P5 were designed and synthesized by randomly embedding 5 mol%, 10 mol%, 15 mol% and 25 mol% feed ratios of low cost 2,2-bithiophene as the third monomer to the famous donor-acceptor (D-A) type copolymer PTB7-Th (P1). All polymers showed similar molecular weight with number-average molecular weight (M_n) and weight-average molecular weight (M_w) in the range of (59−74) and (93−114) kg·mol⁻¹, respectively, to ensure a fair comparison on the structure-property relationships. Compared with the control copolymer PTB7-Th, the random terpolymers exhibited enhanced absorption intensity in a wide range from 400 nm to 650 nm in both solution and film as well as in polymer/PC₇₁BM blends. From grazing incident wide-angle X-ray diffraction (GIWAXS), compared with the regularly alternated copolymer PTB7-Th, the random terpolymers demonstrated mild structural disorder with reduced (100) lamellar stacking and slightly weakened (010) π-π stacking for the polymers as well as slightly reduced PC₇₁BM aggregation in polymer/PC₇₁BM blends. However, the measured hole mobility for terpolymers ((1.20−3.73) × 10⁻⁴ cm²·V⁻¹·s⁻¹) was evaluated to be comparable or even higher than 1.35 × 10⁻⁴ cm²·V⁻¹·s⁻¹ of the alternative copolymer. Enhanced average power conversion efficiency (PCE) from 7.35% to 8.11% and 7.79% to 8.37% was observed in both conventional and inverted device architectures from copolymer P1 to terpolymers P4, while further increasing the 2,2-bithiophene feed ratio decreased the PCE.

Photothermo-chemotherapy, as a new strategy for cancer treatment, incorporates the complementary advantages of photothermal therapy and chemotherapy. In this study, a pH-sensitive diblock copolymer poly(aspartic acid-butanediamine)-poly(2-(diisopropylamino)ethyl methacrylate) (PAsp(DAB)-PDPA) was synthesized and self-assembled into doxorubicin-loaded micelle, which was further used as a template to form a gold nanoshell. After further modification with poly(ethylene glycol), the resulting nanoplatform provided good biocompatibility and desirable photo-thermal conversion efficiency to facilitate photothermal therapy. Meanwhile the nanoparticle also exhibited pH sensitivity, which prevented drug loss while circulating in the blood but enabled rapid drug release after endocytosis. An improved effect was achieved with the combination of photothermal therapy and chemotherapy. In addition, systemic delivery of the nanoplatform could be monitored by photoacoustic tomography. Thereby, this multifunctional nanoplatform would be highly potential for the diagnosis and therapy of cancer.

Polyureas (PU) are well known as a class of high impact engineering materials, and widely used also in emerging advanced applications. As a general observation, most of them are only soluble in a very limited number of highly protonic solvents, which makes their chemical structure analysis a great challenge. Besides the presence of abundant hydrogen bonding, the poor solubility of PU in common organic solvents is often ascribed to the formation of biuret crosslinking in their molecular chains. To clarify the presence of biuret groups in PU has been of great interest. To this end, two samples, based on hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI) and toluene diisocyanate (TDI) respectively, were synthesized by precipitation polymerization of each of these diisocyanates in water-acetone at 30 °C. Their chemical structures were analyzed by high resolution magic angle spinning (HR-MAS) NMR, and through comparison of their NMR spectra with those of specially prepared biuret-containing polyurea oligomers, it was concluded that biuret group was absent in all the PU prepared at 30 °C. In addition, this NMR analysis was also applied to a PU obtained by copolymerization of TDI with ethylene diamine (EDA) and water at 65 °C in EDA aqueous solution. It was confirmed that biuret unit was also absent in this PU and that EDA was more active than water towards TDI. The presence of EDA was crucial to the formation of uniform PU microspheres. This study provides therefore a reliable method for the analysis of PU chemical structure.

Poly(ether imide) (PEI) membrane with enhanced antifouling property was successfully prepared in a mild and simple procedure. The virgin membrane was firstly functionalized with an aqueous solution of diamino-terminated poly(ethylene oxide) block copolymer (PEG-diamine). Glutaraldehyde was used in a second step as a linker to chemically attach additional PEG-diamine to the primary amine groups grafted on PEI membrane surface. Immobilization of PEG segments was confirmed using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy. Ultrafiltration experiments revealed that the enhancement of a PEG coverage on the membrane surface provided superior anti-protein-fouling property. Cycles of protein filtration also demonstrated that the antifouling surface was stable over time and excellent ultrafiltration performance could be maintained without the need of harsh cleansing operation.

Hyper-crosslinked polymers (HCPs) are promising materials for gas capture and storage because of their low cost and easy preparation. In this work, we report the massive preparation of coumarone-indene resin-based hyper-crosslinked polymers via one-step Friedel-Crafts alkylation. Low-cost coumarone-indene resin serves as the new building block and chloroform is employed as both solvent and external crosslinker. A maximum surface area of 966 m²·g⁻¹ is achieved, which is comparable with that of previously-reported coal tar-based porous organic polymers. Most importantly, a large number of heteroatoms including inherent oxygen atoms and introduced chlorine atoms in obtianed HCPs further enhance the interaction between specific sorbate molecule and adsorbent. Therefore, optimal structural and chemical property endow the new coumarone-indene resin-based HCPs with decent gas storage capacity (14.60 wt% at 273 K and 0.1 MPa for CO₂; 1.18 wt% at 77.3 K and 0.1 MPa for H₂). These results demonstrate that new HCPs are potential candidates for applications in CO₂ and H₂ capture.

In this work, hybrid conductive fillers of carbon black (CB) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were introduced into polylactide (PLA)/thermoplastic poly(ether)urethane (TPU) blend (70/30 by weight) to tune the phase morphology and realize rapid electrically actuated shape memory effect (SME). Particularly, the dispersion of conductive fillers, the phase morphology, the electrical conductivities and the shape memory properties of the composites containing CB or CB/CNTs were comparatively investigated. The results suggested that both CB and CNTs were selectively localized in TPU phase, and induced the morphological change from the sea-island structure to the co-continuous structure. The presence of CNTs resulted in a denser CB/CNTs network, which enhanced the continuity of TPU phase. Because the formed continuous TPU phase provided stronger recovery driving force, the PLA/TPU/CB/CNTs composites showed better shape recovery properties compared with the PLA/TPU/CB composites at the same CB content. Moreover, the CB and CNTs exerted a synergistic effect on enhancing the electrical conductivities of the composites. As a result, the prepared composites exhibited excellent electrically actuated SME and the shape recovery speed was also greatly enhanced. This work demonstrated a promising strategy to achieve rapid electrically actuated SME via the addition of hybrid nanoparticles with self-networking ability in binary PLA/TPU blends over a much larger composition range.

The dynamic properties of polymer melts are investigated in the range of normal liquid regime to the supercooled liquid regime. The polymer is modeled as a coarse-grained bead-spring model with chain length ranging from 5 to 160. The mean squared displacement and non-Gaussian parameter are used to describe the self diffusion of polymer beads. We find slow dynamics with decreasing temperature and increasing chain length. The time evolution of non-Gaussian parameters shows two peaks (or one peak one shoulder) in the α-relaxation time, τ_α, regime and sub-diffusion time regime, respectively, where the first primary peak indicates the dynamic heterogeneity stemmed from the motion of beads, and the secondary peak is the result of correlated motion along a polymer chain. Moreover, the relaxation of polymer beads shows clear two-step decay in supercooled melts and the dynamics shows growing heterogeneity with decreasing temperature. As chain length is increased, a peak of the dynamic susceptibility occurs, and the peak height, χ$_4^*$, increases and then reaches a plateau. The curves of the height of the first peak of $\textit {α}_2^{} $, $\textit {α}_2^*$, versus $ {\textit {τ}_{\textit {α}}}$ and the curves of χ$_4^*$ versus $ {\textit {τ}_{\textit {α}}}$ follow two master curves for different chain lengths. Our results indicate the similarity of dynamic heterogeneity dominated by the motion of single bead even the chain length is different. It is interesting to find that the Stokes-Einstein (SE) relation between $ {\textit {τ}_{\textit {α}}}$ and diffusion coefficient D, D~τ${_{q}^{-1}}$, is highly length-scale dependent. The SE relation breaks down in both normal melts regime and supercooled regime at large magnitude of wave vectors, attributed to the non-Brownian motion arising from the chain connectivity and growing heterogeneity due to supercooling. However, the SE relation is reconstructed when the probing length scale is large (at small magnitude of wave vectors). Our results show a hierarchical physical picture of the supercooled polymeric dynamics.

By using polybutene-1 as a typical example, we illustrate the initiation, development and stabilization of cavities in the sample during tensile deformation. Samples with the same crystallinity, long spacing and crystalline lamellar thickness but very different sizes of spherulites were prepared via changing the melt history. Dimension of cavities during stretching the samples was determined by in situ ultra small angle X-ray scattering techniques. It turned out that the size of the cavities was bigger in the sample with larger spherulites than the one with smaller spherulites. The results show clear evidence of initiating cavities within crystalline phase at the grain-boundary of crystalline blocks, growing of cavities passing through parallel stacked lamellar crystals and amorphous layers and finally stablized by tilted lamellae at both ends of the plate-like cavities within the spherulites.

The liquid-crystal assembly of semiflexible-coil diblock copolymers with coil or semiflexible homopolymers is studied by dissipative particle dynamics simulation. Phase diagrams of the blends and orientation ordering parameters among semiflexible blocks are constructed as a function of chain stiffness and homopolymer volume fraction. For semiflexible-coil/coil blends with varying stiffness of semiflexible blocks, we display the rich phase behaviors of the system transited from coil-coil/coil to rod-coil/coil blends. The disorder-lamellae or lamellae-liquid crystalline transition and " dry brush” phenomenon induced by coil homopolymers are observed. For semiflexible-coil/semiflexible blends, adding semiflexible homopolymers also leads to a disorder-order transition and even a transition between monolayer and bilayer smectic-A phase. The results demonstrate that blending homopolymers into semiflexible copolymers can induce liquid-crystal assembly and even improve the orientation ordering of semiflexible blocks effectively.