Elmer Keiser Bolton
When Wallace Carothers arrived at DuPont in 1928 one of the tasks his group took on was the development of new synthetic fibers for textiles. At that time a number of natural polymers such as latex and cellulose were in common use, rayon as a semisynthetic from nitrated cellulose had recently been improved and begun upending the textile industries, and some fully synthetic polymers such as bakelite were also known and being used for certain applications, but the existing fully synthetic polymers could not be drawn into fibers and spun into thread, so great opportunity existed to manufacture thread and yarn from synthetic polymers to join or replace the existing fibers in the market (natural fibers such as cotton, wool, linen, and silk and artificial fiber in the various recently emerged types of rayon).
Graft polymer
High impact polystyrene (HIPS) was discovered by Charles F. Fryling in 1961. HIPS is a low cost, plastic material that is easy to fabricate and often used for low strength structural applications when impact resistance, machinability, and low cost are required. Its major applications include machined prototypes, low-strength structural components, housings, and covers. In order to produce the graft polymer, polybutadiene (rubber) or any similar elastomeric polymer is dissolved in styrene and polymerized. This reaction allows for two simultaneous polymerizations, that of styrene to polystyrene and that of the graft polymerization of styrene-rubber. During commercial use, it can be prepared by graft copolymerization with additional polymer to give the product specific characteristics.
The advantages of HIPS includes:By grafting polymers onto polymer backbones, the final grafted copolymers gain new properties from their parent polymers. Specifically, cellulose graft copolymers have various different applications that are dependent on the structure of the polymer grafted onto the cellulose. Some of the new properties that cellulose gains from different monomers grafted onto it include: