The tremendous surfeit of elemental sulfur (approximately 7 million tons annually) offers a compelling opportunity to develop new synthetic methods to convert sulfur into a useful polymeric material.  We have recently developed a novel polymerization method, termed, inverse vulcanization, to form chemically stable and processable sulfur copolymers by the free radical copolymerization of elemental sulfur and 1,3-diisopropenylbenzene (DIB), where the reaction is conducted in liquid sulfur as the reaction medium and comonomer (Pyun et al., Nature Chemistry 2013, 5, 518).  We have further demonstrated the unusual electrochemical and optical  of these sulfur copolymers that arise from a high content of S-S bonds in the copolymer backbone (Pyun et al., ACS Macro Letters 2014, 3, 229; Pyun et al., Adv. Mater. 2014, DOI: 10.1002/adma.201305607).  We will discuss the synthetic aspects of these materials, along with the potential of these materials for applications as polymeric electrodes in batteries and self-healing optical materials. 

Self-healing polymeric materials from elemental sulfur

248th National Meeting (2014)

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