Mining Chemical Structure Property Relationships to Inform Polymer Discovery for Enhanced Fire Performance
Abstract
There are a limited number of high temperature polymers that meet the U.S. Navy fire, smoke and toxicity requirements for use on submarines and below deck on surface ships. Of these, phenolics are the most widely used to make composite parts and panels. However, phenolic composites are difficult to fabricate due to the need for special post-curing requirements to remove bound water driving up the cost. There is a need for high temperature polymer that can be used to fabricate cost-effective composite materials. The discovery of new high temperature polymers with excellent fire, smoke and toxicity performance is challenging due to the large chemicalspace that must be considered. To accelerate this development, a method to relate the chemical structure to fire properties must be established. Previous research has determined that chemical groups can be used to predict contributions to some fire performance properties; however, all fire properties have not been identified and their chemical group contributions quantified. With fire properties quantified from chemical structure, models can be used to predict the fire performance in standard qualification tests. This would provide an approach for researchers to explore potential polymers prior to time-consuming synthesis pathway creation.The overarching hypothesis of this research is that physics-based models with polymer chemical feature predicted properties informing the modular design of aromatic engineering polymers will provide a new family of fire-resistant structures having a unique ensemble of tailored composition, functionality, molecular weight and distribution, crosslink density, and thermomechanical performance. This collaborative research effort will create a polymer fire performance dataset that includes variation in the polymer features using commercial polymers and lab synthesized polymers. The dataset will be used to construct relationships between polymer features and fire properties, which willbe input into models to predict fire performance. The research team will collaborate to explore new polymer designs using this framework and down-select polymers to synthesize. Synthesis paths will be created to allow for scalable, cost-effective production of polymers. New polymer performance will be benchmarked against U.S. Navy fire performance criteria for submarines and below deck surface ship applications as well as phenolic polymers which are currently used in these applications.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Apr 10, 2025
- Source ID
- N000142512241
Entities
People
- Timothy E. Long
Organizations
- Arizona State University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy