Recent Strategies for the Development of Biosourced-Monomers, Oligomers and Polymers-Based Materials: A Review with an Innovation and a Bigger Data Focus

After setting the ground of the quantum innovation potential of biosourced entities and outlining the inventive spectrum of adjacent technologies that can derive from those, the current review highlights, with the support of Bigger Data approaches, and a fairly large number of articles, more than 250 and 10,000 patents, the following. It covers an overview of biosourced chemicals and materials, mainly biomonomers, biooligomers and biopolymers;these are produced today in a way that allows reducing the fossil resources depletion and dependency, and obtaining environmentally-friendlier goods in a leaner energy consuming society. A process with a realistic productivity is underlined thanks to the implementation of recent and specifically effective processes where engineered microorganisms are capable to convert natural non-fossil goods, at industrial scale, into fuels and useful high-value chemicals in good yield. Those processes, further detailed, integrate: metabolic engineering involving 1) system biology, 2) synthetic biology and 3) evolutionary engineering. They enable acceptable production yield and productivity, meet the targeted chemical profiles, minimize the consumption of inputs, reduce the production of by-products and further diminish the overall operation costs. As generally admitted the properties of most natural occurring biopolymers (e.g., starch, poly (lactic acid), PHAs.) are often inferior to those of the polymers derived from petroleum;blends and composites, exhibiting improved properties, are now successfully produced. Specific attention is paid to these aspects. Then further evidence is provided to support the important potential and role of products deriving from the biomass in general. The need to enter into the era of Bigger Data, to grow and increase the awareness and multidimensional role and opportunity of biosourcing serves as a conclusion and future prospects. Although providing a large reference database, this review is largely initiatory, therefore not mimicking previous classic reviews but putting them in a multiplying synergistic prospective.

Effect of Ink Molecular Weights and Annealing Conditions on Molecular Transfer Printing

The molecular transfer printing（MTP） technique has been invented to fabricate chemical patterns with high fidelity using homopolymer inks. In this work, we systematically studied the effects of the molecular weights of homopolymer inks and transfer conditions on the MTP process. We explored a large range of molecular weights（~3.5-56 kg·mol^（-1）） of hydroxyl-terminated polystyrene（PS-OH） and hydroxyl-terminated poly（methyl methacrylate）（PMMA-OH） in the MTP process, and found that the resulting chemical patterns on replicas from all five blends were functional and able to direct the assembly of films of the same blends. The transfer temperature and the film annealing sequences had an impact on the MTP process. MTP was sensitive to the transfer temperature and could only be performed within a certain temperature range, i.e. higher than the glass transition temperature（T_g） of copolymers and lower than the rearrangement temperature of the assembled domains. Pre-organization of the blend films was also necessary for MTP since the preferential wetting of PMMA domains at the replica surface might result in the formation of a PMMA wetting layer to prevent the presentation of underlying chemical patterns to the replica surface.