Better, stronger: polymer breakthrough to improve things we use everyday

Medicine, mobile phones, computers and clothes could all be enhanced using the process for making paint, according to research by the University of Warwick. A breakthrough in the understanding of polymers - the molecules from which almost everything we use is made - is set to make commercial products, from water bottles to electrical goods, stronger and more effective for their uses. Professor David Haddleton from Warwick's Department of Chemistry has discovered a way to translate the specific requirements of a product into its essential molecular structure. Enacting the same process from which we get emulsion paint and glue, complex polymers can be tailor-made, with producers able to write into the code - essentially, the DNA - of a molecule the exact properties needed for the final product (weight, strength, shape, size etc. This will give commercial producers greater control than ever before over the design of their products by using their existing infrastructure with a simple modification. Controlled polymerisation has revolutionised academic polymer synthesis and traditionally uses one of two techniques: with sulfur or with copper. Both techniques have drawbacks, the former using toxic and noxious bad smelling thiols, and the latter using heavy metal and catalysts which add cost and complication to new materials.