Okay, welcome to the lecture, Crosslink Polymer Systems for the summer semester 2023.

This semester, the lecture will be in English the first time.

I just talked with the students who are here in presence that we will try to use some terms

in English and also give the German expression for it so you know both terms for your future

career.

Yeah, okay, so as you see in the Crosslink Polymer Systems, we will talk about the constitution,

we will talk about the properties and application of Crosslink Polymer Systems, but what are

Crosslink Polymer Systems?

Do you have any ideas or where do you encounter them?

I bet most of you already encountered them today.

Tires for example?

Yes, and tires, bike tires, car tires, yes, natural rubber, yeah, synthetic rubbers, yes.

Hydrogels?

Did you encounter hydrogels today?

Do you use a body lotion?

As it's 8 o'clock in the morning, I also brought some examples here.

These are hopefully, maybe you all encountered them, so this is a rubber kitchen band, yeah,

that's what most of you think about rubbers.

Crosslink Polymer Systems also helped me to get my lunch inside my box, yeah, this is

a sealant for a bread box and maybe not everybody used it today, but these are condoms, yeah,

they're also made of Crosslink Polymer Systems, yeah.

So as you can see, Crosslink Polymers, they are very close to us, they're a very important

part of the industry and as a material scientist slash polymer engineer, it's I think quite

important to know what they are, what they can do.

Okay, so these are some everyday examples, but we also have some more industrial based

examples.

Here you can see, as you already said, tires, car tires, natural rubber, synthetic rubber,

and here we use the elasticity of the tire to dampen the ride and also the ability to

grip the street.

The car tires are the most safety relevant part of the car as all the steering, all the

turning, all the acceleration is transferred by the tire to the road.

So this is an important point and there's a whole industry behind that, one car industry,

car tire industry is huge, a lot of science involved too.

Here you can also see adhesive to glue things together.

Probably all of you know super glue, these are cyanoacrylides, that's a monomer solution

that hardens with the moisture from the air, a second glue and a cyanoacrylate.

However we also have for the building industry, we have these two component glues, we have

like two cartridges that fuse together and then give a strand of highly viscous glue.

We also have this epoxy resin glue, probably most of you encountered this too while fixing

things probably.

These are examples that we will later also encounter in the lecture.

Here we use the on spot molding between two parts and then the cross linking reaction

to fix these parts together permanently.

Another application is probably paints and varnishes, also farben und lacke, lasuren,

where we use the coating process of a liquid on a surface and then the hardening process

can also be a cross linking reaction to create a solid and dense thin film on the irregular

shape of the part.

Most important ingredients are the binder, which is the film former, you have a solvent,

you have pigments of course who do the coloration, you have NDAF additives for film performance,

scratch resistivity and so on.