Advanced Materials Chemistry 2020-21 L10
Coursework for Structure-Property Relationships of Polymers
1. Introduction. Macromolecules, established in 1966, was one of the first scientific journals to be
devoted to the subject of polymers and has now published over 45,000 articles. The objective of
this coursework exercise is to extract information about a single polymer from one of these
articles using the knowledge gained from the lecture course, which demonstrated that the
following sequence is of key important for understanding polymer function.



2. Journal issue selection. The article (i.e. paper) is to be selected from a randomly limited number
of journal issues, determined using your student ID number. Due to there being only 64 volumes,
to date, and a maximum of 24 issues each year, some student ID numbers may have too many
large digits, which would restrict the number of issues from which you can choose the paper.
Therefore, you must substrate 5 from any digit in your ID number that is 6 or greater. The number
of the volume and issue from which you can select a paper must be contained as a two-digit
number within the amended Student ID number (not including the letter B and first digit, which
is usually 0). For example, if your student ID number is B067386, the amended number will be
12331. Therefore, the two-digit volume number may be 12, 23, 33 or 31 and the one- or two-
digit issue number may be 1, 2, 3, 12 or 23 (note there may not be 23 issues for some volumes).
For this example, that provides approximately 20 issues, each of which contain around 20 papers,
from which to choose.
3. Paper (article) selection. It is very important that you select the paper with great care to make
sure that the requested information on the form (see below) can be readily extracted. The
requested information relates to a single polymer (more than one polymer may be described in a
paper). Therefore, it is recommended to take a few hours to skim-read as many papers as possible
in the issues available to you before making your final paper selection. It is recommended to use
full articles or communication and not reviews. Note to avoid losing marks, if there is not sufficient
information to answer one of the sections, it is advisable to find another paper where more
information on the polymers can be obtained.
4. Differences between L10 and L11. UG students (L11) have a form requiring sections (a) – (d) to
be completed. PGT student (L11) have a form requiring sections (a) – (e) to be completed.
5. Form completion. Typed word documents made into PDFs are preferred for clarity but neatly
handwritten forms are acceptable. Form must be passed through Turnitin prior to submission
via Gradescope. The pdf of the Macromolecules paper should also be submitted along with the
completed form.













Example form for Coursework for Structure-Property Relationships of Polymers.
Note use the appropriate form for PGT(L11) and UG(L10).
Student ID: Enter Student ID
e.g. B053623
Degree programme: UG/PGT
Amended student ID:
➜ 53123
Subtract 5 from any digit in your student ID number
that is 6 or larger (e.g. B029673 ➜ 24123).
Selected paper from Macromolecules
(two-digit volume and issue numbers
must be present in above number).
Year:
1998
Volume:
31
Issue:
12
Page:
first page
No.
See Macromolecules website for list of issues: https://pubs.acs.org/loi/mamobx
Title of paper. Enter title of selected paper
(a) Provide the
structure of a
polymer
described in the
paper.
[4]
Draw structure of polymer selected from paper
(use ChemDraw software or draw it free-hand, photograph it on your phone
and then paste it as a jpeg or equivalent)
(b) Describe the
synthesis of the
polymer.


[5]
Describe in words the synthesis of the polymer (e.g. is the synthesis chain-
growth or step growth?), draw the monomer and any other reagents
required for the polymerisation (see above)
(c) Summarise
the key
properties of the
polymer (e.g.
physical state,
transition
temperatures,
solubility, etc.)
and how they
were determined
[5]
This section should include a full list of data relevant to the properties of
the polymer. This could include molecular mass, physical state, any thermal
transition temperatures, solubility (in which solvents?). Thermal
degradation temperature, colour...etc.

(d) Explain how
the structure of
the polymer
determines its
key physical
properties.
[6]
This section should list properties and how they relate to the structure of
the polymer. For example, film forming abilities (high molecular mass), fibre
formation (high mass and Tg), electronic conductivity (conjugated
structure)....etc. etc.
(e) Explain how
the properties of
the polymer
make it useful to
the study
described or to
an application
Level 11 only
This section should describe how the properties make the polymer useful
and how simple modifications suggested in the paper (or those based on
the lecture information) can improve the performance of the polymer.
stated in the
paper. How
might the
polymer be
improved?
[5]







































































































































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